Bengaluru engineering students accidentally build low cost 3D printer in 20 days

A few planks of wood, a circuit board, a stepper motor, a projector and a beaker. Add mechanical engineering to the list and 20 days of hard work by four determined students and the final produce is a low-cost 3D printer.

Akhil MS, Adarsha M, Anish SA and Amar Sale, the 20-year-old, third-year mechanical engineering students from CMR Institute of Technology (CMRIT), built the 3D printer for a state-level exhibition quite by accident.

Their original project to produce biodiesel failed and they tinkered a Plan B in just 20 days. The device cost them Rs 43,000, less than a fourth of a branded 3-D printer's price in the marketplace.

Under the guidance of their professor Sagar M Baligidad, the boys tinkered at a makerspace to come up with the 6-kg printer that works on digital light processing (DLP). Conventional 3D printers work on the fused deposition modelling (FDM) technology.

FDM printers are known to have low accuracy and bulky .Here, we use ultraviolet light from a projector for printing," Akhil pointed out.

Models are first designed in the form of layers on a computer-aided design software. "Each layer is then separately projected onto the liquid resin and the projected area gets solidified. This is done for each layer," Anish explained. This approach prints models at a third of the time conventional printers take, the inventors said.

After overcoming hurdles such as a circuit board crash and a non-responsive motor, the 3D printer competed with other projects at a national-level competition in MVJ College of Engineering in April, winning a cash prize.

It's a very innovative and creative way of reducing cost, said Tarun Kumar, a research scholar at IISc's Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, who judged the entries at the competition the 3D printer entered. "It can be a gamechanger, something government funding agencies can support.

Going forward, the team wants to further improve the printer as a final-year project.

Surendranath Reddy, cofounder of Chennai-based Redd, one of the pioneers of low-cost 3D printing, hailed the effort while pointing out a common mistake students make.

Students overlook operational, marketing and retailing costs. To retail a 3D printer at the same price for which it was built is a challenge," he said.

source: techgig.com