Three-dimensional printing was supposed to be the next big thing, but a combination of factors have kept it from becoming a mainstream technology. One of the ongoing issues is that 3D printing is slow, and most of the technological improvements have been geared toward improving quality and lowering the cost. A team of engineers at MIT are now tackling the speed issue. They’ve designed a new 3D printer that can operate up to 10 times faster than a traditional printer.

The speed of a 3D printer isn’t the most significant barrier to adoption, but it’s still something that needs to be addressed. It could also help alleviate some of the technology’s other shortcomings. Even small objects can take as long as an hour to print with conventional consumer-grade 3D printers, and it’s hard to know if a particular design will print correctly on a given system. That leads to waste and frustration as people fiddle with 3D models to compensate for the issues. If it only takes one-tenth as long to test a new design, 3D printing could be far less annoying.

This system doesn’t require completely rethinking the way 3D printing currently works. It’s based on the same fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology with which you’re probably familiar. Plastic is melted and extruded onto a build surface in FDM, but the fast fused filament fabrication (FastFFF) system designed at MIT has several features that are, well… faster. The video below shows the FastFFF printer working at normal speed — it’s not sped up.

The print heads in this prototype printer have been redesigned to have higher output than standard printers, and there’s a screw mechanism that feeds filament to them at higher speed. Normal 3D printers use a pinch wheel mechanism to feed in plastic filament, but the screw design gets a much better grip. Of course, you need an efficient heating element to melt all that filament quickly. That’s why the team added a laser to the print head, which can melt the plastic faster. The last major piece of the puzzle is how the print head moves in the FastFFF printer. A high-performance gantry system lets the mechanism zip along to drop molten plastic as fast as it can extrude it.

According to the recently published paper, FastFFF can achieve a build volume of 127 cubic centimeters (7.75 cubic inches) per hour. The team hopes to see FastFFF reach commercial viability, but it’s not clear how that would work yet. An existing firm might license the technology or MIT could start a company to make and sell them. Either way, it’ll be a few years before anyone can buy it.