From the course: 3D Printing: Short-Run Production

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Field-deployable manufacturing

Field-deployable manufacturing

From the course: 3D Printing: Short-Run Production

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Field-deployable manufacturing

- [Instructor] One advantage of 3D printers versus traditional manufacturing is that it's often possible to deploy the printers to a remote site. Settings were in-situ 3D printing makes sense range from Earth's orbit to rural African hospitals. Or a site might be temporarily hard to get to because of a natural disaster. - [Instructor] One obvious application of 3D printing in the field is to use it to allow astronauts to create replacement parts or simple tools in space. You might think that gravity is essential for a filament 3D print to work, but prints stick to the platform mechanically quite well. There's some other issues to resolve, but a filament-based 3D printer has already been demonstrated on the International Space Station. Even more ambitious, a technology demonstration machine called the Refabricator has flown to test out several cycles of printing and recycling the same plastic. The eventual goal is to allow…

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