From the course: Additive Manufacturing: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

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Printing at different scales

Printing at different scales

From the course: Additive Manufacturing: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

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Printing at different scales

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- [Narrator 1] 3D printers are now capable of printing objects at scales on the order of a few tenths of a millimeter to a few meters. That's a factor of about 10,000 in the linear dimension. If you want to think about more macroscopic terms, that's the ratio between the width of a filing cabinet drawer and the width of Manhattan. - [[Narrator] 2] One thing that remains constant is that if you're creating an object one layer at a time, the print time is going to depend on the number of layers. Very finely detailed prints are typically made with processes that use lasers to solidify a powder or liquid resin since the laser spot size can be a lot smaller than a physical nozzle could ever be. That means that to print in a reasonable time, large objects need to have thick layers. When extruding material from a nozzle, this means that the nozzle will need to be pretty big since the layer's thickness is limited by the nozzle's…

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