A new innovation by Carbon3D, unveiled Monday at the TED2015 conference, could finally move 3D printing out of the hobby shop and onto every factory floor.

Imagine you're in an emergency room with a blood vessel blockage. To save your life, a surgeon will first insert a tube, and carefully guide it through the clog. Then she might insert a stent, a piece metal or fabric mesh, to keep the vessel open. But that piece of hardware isn't made to fit your body. Carbon3D can make one that does.

"The idea that you could produce a biodegradable stent that takes in your own anatomy and the tributaries of your blood vessels while you're on the catheter table in an emergency room — that's an amazing new future that is now in reach," said Joseph DeSimone, CEO and co-founder of Carbon3D and a chemistry professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.

The medical potential of the Carbon3D process, created by a research team in North Carolina headed by DeSimone, isn't even the main point. Rather, the real game changer is the fact that their completely new approach involves growing—rather than printing—3D objects. DeSimone told Popular Mechanics that their grown objects are already finding their way into a range of industries from medical to automotive. There's even one growing parts for Hollywood films.

A brief history of 3D printing

It all started in Japan with a tiny house that took 4.5 hours to build. It was made of plastic and measured 2.5 inches across and 2 inches high and had "partitions, furniture, and stairs." It was one of the first 3D printed items to ever exist. That was 1981.

"Traditional 3D printing is actually 2D printing over and over again."

In the 34 years since those first 3D models emerged from vats of chemical stew, 3D printing has been used in the air, on roads, and inside our bodies (or as replacement parts for them). And the MakerStuff, oh, the MakerStuff. But 3D printing has remained on the DIY and manufacturing fringes because the build process is slow and the parts are too weak to go into most working machines.

Think of the old way of 3D printing as a kind of plastic (or sometimes metal or biological) pancake stacking factory. Layers of polymer are laid down—sometimes preheated, sometimes hardened by laser light. It's slow (even small objects can take hours) and what comes out is pretty weak thanks to all those layers.

"In many ways, traditional 3D printing is actually 2D printing over and over again," said DeSimone. "But we actually grow parts continuously out of liquid resin puddle, and can do it really, really fast, at hundreds to thousands of millimeters an hour."

What's next

Carbon3D's technology does this by harnessing oxygen and light to grow the parts continuously as the object rises like the T-1000 from Terminator out of the resin. One experiment captured in a study published Monday in Science shows a mini-Eiffel Tower emerging from a vat of blue liquid in just six minutes.

"We actually grow parts continuously out of liquid resin puddle, and can do it really, really fast."

The key to speed, said DeSimone, is the "dead zone." That's what he calls an area the thickness of just a few red blood cells on the growing surface. In the zone, the projected image slices of the object being created do a delicate dance with the oxygen that keeps the resin in liquid form until it's ready to be made solid.

That chemist's approach to 3D is new in the decades-old field. "3D printing for the last 25 years has been a wonderful celebration of mechanical engineering, but I'm a chemist," DeSimone said.

Future applications

Carbon3D, Inc

Venture capitalists seem to agree with him. The company has already raised $41 million over the last year to commercialize the technology, called "Continuous Liquid Interphase Printing" or CLIP.

"The approach that these chemists have taken, it's so dramatically different and potentially disruptive at both a materials level and in pace, which has always been a point of friction around 3D printing — I mean, it's like watching paint dry," said Jim Goetz, a Carbon3D board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, which participated in the Series B round of financing in 2014 along with Silver Lake Kraftwerk and Northgate Capital.

Where might that money take CLIP? DeSimone told Popular Mechanics that there's already a small "fleet" of machines out there, creating new stuff for a few industry partners, though none of those relationships are public yet. He did give some hints.

His said Carbon3D can make highly elastic materials great for running shoes, or make ones that can take the rattle out of a car engine. They can also make your dental implants and replacement teeth while you sit back in the dentist's chair with cotton balls in your cheeks waiting. And if the technology succeeds there may be few areas of manufacturing untouched by it in the years ahead.

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