3D printers tell you when your design will fail
[Philip Lelyveld comment: back in my engineering days this was called 'strength of materials' design training. I'm surprised it wasn't implemented in 3D printer design software sooner.]
MAKE a mistake with your average office printer and the worst that happens is a paper jam and some wasted ink. Do the same with a 3D printer, though, and your newly realised creation - anything from a toy to a key piece of machinery - could crumble the second you start using it. That's because 3D printers cannot yet check if a digital 3D model will hold together when printed.
"Even when a model looks perfectly fine on your computer, its physical representation after 3D printing might not be structurally sound and it can simply break down," says Ondrej Stava at Adobe in San Jose, California. Now he and colleagues have developed software that can check whether printed models will resist gravity and rough handling, and fixes them if they can't.
Their program works out the most probable rest positions for a model, such as standing up or on its side and calculates the effects of gravity for each.
Read the full story here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528785.800-3d-printers-get-a-reality-check.html