Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Cincinnati Inc. are perfect examples of how to aim for the sky and achieve it. A few years back these two organizations had signed an agreement to make a printer that would be 200-500 times faster than the traditional printers that existed in the market at that time and also would be capable of printing polymer components which would be ten times larger or about one cubic meter. So they are back with a BAAM!
The machine that they have made which does have a speed that is actually 200 times faster than the machines that are in the market nowadays. BAAM implies for Big Area Additive Manufacturing, this technology has spread in the 3D printing world like wild fire. The origin of these printers will undoubtedly evolve the big shots of 3D printing world like 3D Systems and Stratasys.
Rick Neff, manager of market development for Cincinnati Inc. said, “BAAM is a FDM machine on steroids. We use feed stock of plastic pellets like [those] used in an injection molding machine, so it is affordable for large production parts. At over 10 pounds per hour of ABS plastic it is several orders of magnitude faster than other typical FDM systems. We sacrifice some accuracy and detail for speed.” The price of this machine has not been made public yet but the company will be able to take in orders for the manufacturing of this machine by the end of this year. This machine is surely going to be a game changer in the process of mass production.
Image Source: http://www.e-ci.com/baam