Polychrome (colour) Printing

Objects can be printed faster and cheaper than any other rapid-prototyping and manufacturing machine so far. The minimum wall-thickness is 2mm, so this technology will rather be used to produce mass-objects at a very low price. The machine can print 24-bit colours, exactly like a good office printer. This can be a great addition to the information carried by your object: you can print on your object all sorts of pictures or data, from your logo to the results of a spatial finite element analysis! This can easily enhance communication and be, for example, an aid in the discovery of design flaws early in the design cycle. Objects are made of plaster-like material. We can strengthen them by applying a coat of super-glue if you want us to.

 The 3D object is sliced into 89-micron layers. For each layer, the machine first spreads a coat of plaster powder over the printing area, then prints the contours of the object for this layer. Just imagine your usual office photocopier printing contours on a layer of plaster powder rather than on paper. The next layer is then printed on top of the previous one in the same way: first a coat of plaster over the whole printing area, then ink to show the contours of the object on this layer. The ink solidifies the plaster powder so once all the layers have been printed, the finished object is solid and buried in a tank of plaster. Several parts can be built at a time: the building envelope is 250mm x 350mm x 200mm. zp131 is the material we use, which allows great colour accuracy. The full mechanical datasheet for this material is available in PDF here.