The University of Maine teamed with several partners recently to produce the world’s largest 3D-printed boat, earning three Guinness World Records in the process. The effort set records for the world’s largest prototype polymer 3D printer, largest solid 3D‐printed object, and largest 3D‐printed boat.
UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center unveiled the 25-foot-long, 5,000-pound patrol boat –– dubbed the 3Dirigo –– on Oct. 10 at an event attended by some 250 business executives, university leaders, community members, and federal and state officials, including Susan Collins and Angus King, both U.S. Senators from Maine.
The event culminated with the boat being tested in the Alfond W2 Ocean Engineering Laboratory, an offshore model testing facility equipped with a high-performance wind machine over a multidirectional wave basin.
It normally would take months to construct a boat using traditional manufacturing materials and processes, whether fiberglass or wood. Not so in this case.
Using a carbon fiber‐reinforced ABS resin specially formulated by Techmer PM LLC for additive manufacturing, the UMaine center printed the entire boat in less than 72 hours –– from Sept. 19 to Sept. 22 –– on a MasterPrint hybrid printer made by Rockford, Ill.‐based Ingersoll Machine Tools Inc. Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest science and energy laboratory, worked with the university to develop the printing process.
The huge MasterPrint machine –– whose printing nozzle is suspended from a gantry –– is designed to print objects as long as 100 feet by 22 feet wide by 10 feet high, at a rate of up to 500 pounds per hour. The printed parts can then be finish machined with an included, five-axis milling module, according to Ingersoll. A bigger gantry would enable an even larger print envelope.
The boat was made entirely using Techmer’s Electrafil® ABS 1501 3DP resin, according to Tom Drye, Techmer PM’s vice president for emerging markets, innovation and application development. Techmer, and particularly 3D Technology Manager Alan Franc, have provided extensive material support to Ingersoll for the past three years or so.
Curtis Goffinski, Ingersoll’s principal technologist for advanced manufacturing, acknowledged that support, noting that “Techmer’s expertise in engineered thermoplastics continues to accelerate our control of these record-breaking, large-format prints.”
UMaine, meanwhile, has additional, ambitious plans for this technology and one‐of‐a‐kind printer. A $20 million research collaboration with ORNL will support fundamental research in key technical areas in large‐scale, bio-based additive manufacturing. The UMaine/ORNL/ Techmer partnership is designed to advance efforts to produce new, bio-based materials conducive to 3D printing of large, structurally demanding systems.
The research will focus on cellulose nanofiber (CNF) production, drying, functionalization and compounding with thermoplastics, building on UMaine’s leadership in CNF technology and extrusion research. By placing CNF from wood into thermoplastics, bioderived recyclable material systems can be developed with properties that may rival traditional materials, possibly even metals.
“Maine is the most forested state in the nation,” Sen. Angus King said at the unveiling ceremony, “and now we have a 3D printer big enough to make use of this bountiful resource.” He said this investment in Maine’s forest economy “will serve to increase sustainability, advance the future of bio-based manufacturing and diversify our forest products industry.”
“This 3D printer,” added Habib Dagher, “is an outgrowth of research we have been doing for 15 years in combining cellulosic nano and microfibers with thermoplastic materials.” Dagher, executive director of UMaine’s 100,000‐square‐foot composites center, said, “Our goal is to print with 50% wood products at 500 pounds per hour, and achieve properties similar to aluminum.”
Clinton, Tenn.‐based Techmer PM is involved in this development work, as well, Drye said. The company has supplied UMaine with its polylactic acid (PLA) resin that contains wood flour for use in future 3D printing projects that will require biorenewable‐type materials. Techmer is working on many new variations of bio-renewable and more traditional structural materials supporting the growing field of large-part additive manufacturing.
See a time‐lapse video of the printing of the boat at https://youtu.be/34F71XqvOjg.
For more information about the partners involved, go to:
- UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center at https://composites.umaine.edu
- Ingersoll Machine Tools at https://en.machinetools.camozzi.com
- Techmer PM at techmerpm.com
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I like it. What is the cost of 5,000 pounds of carbon-fiber-reinforced ABS resin?