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认为碳的3 d打印技术支持a host of customized medical devices and parts. Here’s how.
Over the 10 minutes that Carbon CEO Joseph DeSimone was describing his company’s 3D printing technology to a TED audience, a buckyball-shaped part rose out of a pool of liquid polymer resin in its entirety.
The 2015 event generated a lot of buzz because it overcame perceptions that 3D printing was a slow, cumbersome process. And Redwood City, Calif.–based Carbon has made significant strides since then, including a $200 million fundraise earlier this year that included Johnson & Johnson Innovation.
Johnson & Johnson, in fact, has a more than two-year-old strategic collaboration with Carbon to produce customized orthopedic surgical instruments and other medical devices.
So how is Carbon’s 3D printing tech potentially better, and what does that mean for medical devices?
Steven Pollack, an FDA veteran who joined Carbon as a senior staff research scientist in 2015, thinks Carbon’s advantages rest on three pillars:
1.碳弄清楚如何使立体光刻工作
Carbon’s roots go back to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where DeSimone and his colleagues tried to overcome 3D printing’s speed and quality problems. A potential solution to the layer-by-layer tediousness of other 3D printing methods was to create a part through stereolithography, using light to convert a photocurable resin into a solid.
Carbon’s proprietary 3D printing technology combines light and oxygen to rapidly make products from programmable and biocompatible liquid resins. [Image courtesy of Carbon]
“You do it by projecting a series of images that end up being the cross sections moving from the bottom to the top of the object and placing the next amount of material on the previous one that you created. And the big shortcoming for that is that you either have a very large vat of resin that you hold your part down into as you build parts. Or you have a very shallow pool of resin that you hold your part out of. But you suffer from the problem in that latter version that your part is continually stuck to the bottom,” Pollack explained toMedical Design & Outsourcingearlier this year.
DeSimone and his colleagues realized that they could take advantage of the fact that oxygen frustrates the polymerization process, something that researchers had previously found to be a nuisance.
Carbon’s original intellectual property involves a special window at the bottom of the resin reservoir, Pollack said. The window is transparent to UV light, but it’s also permeable to oxygen. Carbon’s technology drives oxygen intentionally into the very lowest part of the resin pool, saturating the first 30 to 40 microns with oxygen and creating a “dead zone” where polymerization doesn’t take place.
“因此，现在当您开始发展自己的零件时，您永远不会在窗户上种植它，您将其生长30微米。当您将零件从窗户上拉开以引入过程的下一步时，该零件像泵一样，将新鲜的树脂在其后面拉出，从而稀释氧气并使该材料聚合化。” Pollack说。
据Pollack称，结果是快速打印，几乎没有机械影响。
“在我们的技术中，没有层。如果您将一半分开，您会发现它完全是整体的。…我们认为…机械性能，它与注射模制部分相当。在表面文本方面，它与注射成型部分相当。” Pollack说。
2.使用值得生产的材料
根据Pollack的说法，当涉及仅光化学硬化的聚合物时，它们无法匹配尼龙或弹性体的机械性能。当涉及到碳机上使用的几种仅使用紫外线树脂时，您可以获得“易于查看但不一定在机械上可靠的好部分”。
Carbon’s solution to the materials challenge was to turn to a host of thermally-activated polymers.
“您使用构建过程来设置脚手架（如果愿意的话），那是光化学生成的，它具有零件的形状和准确性。您采取该部分，清洁任何残留树脂，然后将其烘烤 - 就像您将瓷器放在车轮上并放入炉子中以发射二次化学反应一样。… 这是同一件事。我们使用环氧化学，氰酸酯化学和氨基烷化学来创建第二个网络，该网络现在将其融入了实际的工程特性。” Pollack说。
“We can make a material that’s equivalent to an injection-molded urethane, or a cast urethane, or an injection-molded nylon.”
Pollack在Carbon的主要工作之一是与他在FDA的老同事合作，通过医疗设备的批准和清除过程来牧养新材料和过程。
3.软件驱动的3D打印技术
Carbon’s VP of engineering Craig Carlson came from from Tesla Motors, where he was VP of software and electrical integration. “He came to Carbon with the mindset that we can capture every detail of the manufacturing and operation process of the printer and have that captured and codified, and that’ll be very important if anybody wants to know about the history of the part,” Pollack said.
Think data about the provenance of the part, what resin it came from, which printer was it on, how was that printer behaving that day, the characteristics of a particular layer.
“We capture every piece of that data, and we have it all available for every part that’s printed. It’s available to the manufacturer to create a digital master device record— a manufacturing device record,” Pollack said.
Carbon’s printers are Internet-connected, so the company is able to collect performance information and continually improve the machines through software upgrades.
“就是说，我们也认识到医疗设备制造世界不喜欢每六周升级的软件，因为他们必须重新验证和验证。因此，我们有一个模型，使我们可以从本质上锁定用于制造和生产的软件分支。” Pollack说。
Manufacturer don’t own the printer; they have a subscription for it.
“They keep their intellectual property on their side of the firewall. We don’t get to see the actual object they’re printing. We just get to monitor the machine’s health,” Pollack said.
在医疗设备行业方面，碳的技术需要克服一些监管挑战。但是Pollack认为这最终可能会破坏性。
Pollack说：“您现在可以扔掉霉菌，扔掉库存。”“您可以丢弃这样的观念，‘哦，我必须从七个零件中制作那部分，然后将它们粘合在一起，以便我可以通过频道进行频道来浏览它们。’……我在建造它时放了负空间。我不必带走东西就能把它带到那里。这是减法和加法之间的区别。”
提交以下：3D printing • additive manufacturing • stereolithography
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