LESSON 1.1 · 2:41 · CHAPTER 1 · WHY PRINT BIG
Pellets, not filament
Large format printing is cheap because it feeds injection-moulding pellets through a screw, not because it is a big desktop printer.
Predict · at 0:57 in the video
Oak Ridge National Laboratory costed the same 65 pound autoclave tool both ways: filament at 180 dollars a pound, or pellets at 8. How much cheaper was the pellet-printed tool?
About seventeen times. 31,368 dollars against 1,870. The feedstock alone is twenty-two and a half times cheaper per pound.
Further reading
This course is our own. These books go deeper.
- The economics of Big Area Additive Manufacturing, Post et al., Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, 2016
- Additively manufactured carbon fibre-reinforced composites: state of the art and perspective, van de Werken et al., Composites Part A, 2020
About the numbers
Simulations in this lesson are our own. Where a number rests on an assumption or a single source, the video marks it with an asterisk and says where it comes from.
Up next · 1.2 · 2:08Don't pay for the inside