A Roadmap Towards Parallel Printing for Desktop 3D Printers

Abstract

3D printers with multiple extruders (or multi-headed printers) are common in the desktop fabrication community, but are primarily used for multi-color or multi-material printing, using only one extruder at a time. What if these multi-headed desktop printers could also be used for simultaneous parallel printing? While this is a relatively unexplored direction, we argue that it deserves further investigation: a flexible, robust, and affordable parallel printing ecosystem could significantly reduce fabrication time for many applications and further enhance the value of desktop rapid prototyping.

We propose a research agenda to explore the development of a parallel printing pipeline, and summarize our observations from a preliminary investigation of simultaneous extrusion. We hope this vision will encourage and guide future research in developing hardware, firmware, and slicers to facilitate parallel 3D printing.

Talk

SFF 2021 talk by Molly Carton and Chandrakana Nandi.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{2021-sff-3dp,
  title     = {A Roadmap Towards Parallel Printing for Desktop 3D Printers},
  author    = {Nandi, Chandrakana and Carton, Molly Aubrey and Anderson, Adam and Zhao, Haisen and Darulova, Eva and Grossman, Dan and Jeffery Ian Lipton, Adriana Schulz and Tatlock, Zachary},
  series    = {SFF 2021},
  booktitle = {32nd International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, An Additive Manufacturing Conference},
  date      = {2021},
}

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