Week 12

3D PRINTING

Welcome back to our weekly blogs! This week, our class had learnt about 3D printing. Before we get into 3D printing, we need to know why we chemical engineers have to learn about 3D printing.

In our world today, society is increasingly digitized and globalised. Because of this, manufacturers all around the world are shifting towards advanced manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing. A competent worker for these manufaturers will be one that can learn and adapt to new knowledge such as digital fabrication.

Why Digital Fabrication?

1. Enables one to quickly make what you need and when you need
2. It is fully customisable to the individual needs
3. Fast, becoming an important enabling technology in many chemical engineering fields

Digital fabrication is an additive technology that is used in the oil and gas industries for the following reasons:

• Remote and urgent nature of business
• Low cost high complexity
• Shorten supply chain
• Generative and iterative design

Digital fabrication is good for prototyping as it allows:

• Physical evaluation of design
• Perform functional testing before committingtoafull productionrun
• Print numerous design iterations to identify and remove errors before production

Good for End Use Parts as it allows:

• Extend lifespan of older equipment by printing obsolete parts
• Reverse-engineer spare parts
• Customisable high value/low voloume End-Use production

Afterwards, our group were tasked to make up a presentation about slicer settings for a Quality Printout in a 3D printer. They are very important as the printout quality and time taken for the printout will depend on these settings. These were our presentation slides:

And that is all for our blog entry for this week. Thank you for reading along!