Materials - 3D Printing: The Basics and Beyond - page 52

Sand : Sand is typically used for making molds in industry. One example is Ford, which is
making testing prototypes using molds printed by Exone's 3D printers. Voxeljet is special-
ized in this field, other companies are EOS and Wuhan Binhu.
Paper : There is one company that excels in 3D paper printers, and that is British Mcor
Technologies. Mcor's printers uses standard A4 printing paper which are glued together
with a water based adhesive, this makes the material comparatively inexpensive. Another
benefit of using paper is that it can be colored in many various colors. However, the prac-
tical use of the produced objects is currently limited to models, prototypes, art pieces and
figurines.
Wood : German garage inventor Kai Parthy bought his first FDM 3D printer in 2011 and
came up with a new filament mix of plastics and wood the year after. The material is called
Laywoo-D3 and contains 40% of recycled wood. The material can also be painted, ground
and cut like wood although it is extruded like any other FDM printed plastic filament.
One interesting technology invention popped up in 2013 from a Canadian startup called
4AXYZ. In this process the wood structure was not based on sawdust but on small uni-
formly cut pieces of wood which gives a more natural look. American Emerging Objects
(see more under “Salt”) has developed a wood-based material in form of a powder which
is used in a binder jetting process.
Other companies that have developed filament similar to Laywoo are Italian Design for
Craft, Chinese PopBit, Dutch ColorFabb and Formfutura.
Silicone : U.K company Fripp Design has developed a special technology for printing silic-
one with their “Picsima” 3D printer. Their technology has been used for printing nose and
ear prostheses. It is more advanced than the silicone printing that is being marketed by the
low-budget 3D printer manufacturer Hyrel. They are using a kind of simple extruding, as
is the technology offered by Canadian extrudermaker Structur3D Printing.
Glass : 3D printing of glass is far from fully developed. Exone has a glass printer that uses
binder jetting technology with post-processing in a high temperature kiln. The glass pro-
duced from this process is not transparent, it is a white or black soda-lime glass. HP did
research on 3D printing of glass in a project called Ragnarok in preparation for their big
entry into the 3D printing market.
Carbon Fiber : American company Markforged has made a printer that incorporates
strands of carbon fiber in nylon to produce a stronger material than what is usually possible
with the FDM process. The process is called Composite Filament Fabrication (CFF). Car-