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Printing Airplanes

30_article_3937_thumb_printed_airplane

Two decades ago, the coolest thing you could do with a printer was make long banners. A decade later, printing photographs at home became easy. The current bleeding edge of printing involves 3D manufacturing and even electronics. University of Southampton engineers have taken 3D manufacturing printing to yet another level by printing a complete UAV that can be assembled in minutes and flown over 100mph. The method is called laser sintering where various pieces of nylon plastic can be cut and fused together through a laser printer. The end vehicle is over 2m in size and took only a week to design and “print”.

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Cutting edge? by Brandon

I’m kind of surprised to see there is so much excitement around this, as I used one of these machines in an engineering lab at Texas A&M ten years ago. We weren’t building working airplanes or anything, but the process was the same – lasers to melt together thin layers of powdered plastic.

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