Patent Application
20200406530
The present invention generally relates to additive manufacturing devices, and more specifically, to a glass blowing additive manufacturing device.
Additive manufacturing, or three-dimensional (3D) printing, is typically conducted in a 3D printer or another similar device and involves the deposition and curing or hardening of material in patterned layers to form a 3D printed object. Most 3D printers include a housing, a printing bed disposed in the housing, a printing head, nozzle or dispenser that dispenses the material onto the printing bed and then onto subsequent layers, a curing or hardening element that cures or hardens the material and a controller system. The control system controls the position and orientation of the printing head, nozzle or dispenser as well as the position and orientation of the curing or hardening element. In this way, the 3D printed object can be provided with various, oftentimes complex geometries.
Embodiments of the present invention are directed to an additive manufacturing device. A non-limiting example of the additive manufacturing device includes a housing, a printing bed, a printing head and a controller. The printing bed is rotatably disposed in the housing and includes a surface and a body. The body defines an air conduit terminating at an open end at the surface and is fluidly communicative with an exterior of the housing. The printing head is movably disposed in the housing and configured to print molten glass material onto the printing bed at a location corresponding to the open end of the air conduit and onto successive layers of previously printed molten glass material. The controller is configured to control movements and printing operations of the printing head, rotations of the printing bed and airflow to the molten glass material through the air conduit.
Embodiments of the present invention are directed to an additive manufacturing device. A non-limiting example of the additive manufacturing device includes a housing, a printing bed rotating element, a printing bed, a track, a printing head, a pump and a controller. The printing bed is disposed in the housing and is rotatable by the printing bed rotating element. The printing bed includes a surface and a body. The body defines an air conduit terminating at an open end at the surface and being fluidly communicative with an exterior of the housing. The printing head is disposed in the housing, is supported by the track to be movable relative to the printing bed in multiple directions and multiple degrees of freedom and is configured to print molten glass material onto the printing bed at a location corresponding to the open end of the air conduit. The pump is configured to pump air through the air conduit toward the open end. The controller is configured to operate the track and the printing head, the printing bed rotating element and the pump.
Embodiments of the present invention are directed to a method of automatically operating an additive manufacturing device. A non-limiting example of the method includes printing molten glass material onto a printing bed, rotating the printing bed, pumping air into the molten glass material and manipulating the molten glass material into a predefined shape.
Additional technical features and benefits are realized through the techniques of the present invention. Embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed subject matter. For a better understanding, refer to the detailed description and to the drawings.
The specifics of the exclusive rights described herein are particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed in the claims at the conclusion of the specification. The foregoing and other features and advantages of the embodiments of the invention are apparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:
The diagrams depicted herein are illustrative. There can be many variations to the diagrams or the operations described therein without departing from the spirit of the invention. For instance, the actions can be performed in a differing order or actions can be added, deleted or modified. Also, the term “coupled” and variations thereof describe having a communications path between two elements and do not imply a direct connection between the elements with no intervening elements/connections between them. All of these variations are considered a part of the specification.
As will be described below, an additive manufacturing device is provided. The additive manufacturing device includes a housing, a printing bed, a printing head and a controller. The printing bed is rotatably disposed in the housing and includes a surface and a body. The body defines an air conduit terminating at an open end at the surface and is fluidly communicative with an exterior of the housing. The printing head is movably disposed in the housing and configured to print molten glass material onto the printing bed at a location corresponding to the open end of the air conduit. The controller is configured to control movements and printing operations of the printing head, rotations of the printing bed and airflow to the molten glass material through the air conduit.
3D printers and additive manufacturing devices in general are made up of a few different parts such as the extruder head and a print bed. The extruder head adds material to the print bed corresponding to a predefined model. Typically, additive manufacturing devices use plastic materials such as PLA, ABS or PVA to create objects but, recently, there have been additive manufacturing devices brought into the market that purport to print glass. The issues with some of these devices is that the material, when printed, cannot form beautiful shapes as one would see in an art museum or even as a home decoration. The imperfections that cause this are the lack of smoothness on the object, the thickness of the material that can be added and the inability of a standard additive manufacturing device, even one that can print glass, to manipulate the glass past deposition of the material.
One or more embodiments of the invention provide for an additive manufacturing device that can print glass in such a way as to avoid the formation of an object with imperfections such as a lack of smoothness and uncontrolled thicknesses where the object can be manipulated into a predefined shape.
One or more embodiments of the invention provide an additive manufacturing device in which molten glass material can be printed onto a rotatable surface through which air can be blown into the glass. With the molten glass material remaining in the molten state, the rotations of the surface and the airflow into the molten glass material create a bulb that can be manipulated and shaped.
Turning now to a more detailed description of aspects of the present invention,
In accordance with embodiments of the present invention, the additive manufacturing device 101 can further include a track 135, a printing bed rotating element 136 and a pump 137. The track 135 is configured to support the printing head 130 in the interior 114 of the housing 110. The controller 140 is operably coupled to the track 135 such that the track 135 is controllable by the controller 140 to move the printing head 130 in multiple directions and with multiple degrees of freedom relative to the printing bed 120. The printing bed rotating element 136 can include or be provided as a motor and is configured to rotate the printing bed 120 (i.e., to rotate the surface 121) at one or multiple and varying rotational speeds. The controller 140 is operably coupled to the printing bed rotating element 136 such that the printing bed rotating element 136 is controllable by the controller 140 to execute rotations of the printing bed 120. The pump 137 can include or be provided as a blower and is configured to pump air through the air conduit 123 toward the open end 124 at one or multiple and varying air pressures. The controller 140 is operably coupled to the pump 137 such that the pump 137 is controllable by the controller 140 to execute pumping.
With reference to
With reference back to
In the case of the modification feature 151 being the glass smoothing tool 152 as shown in
In the case of the modification feature 151 being the glass crimping tool 153 as shown in
With continued reference to
With reference to
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The data stored in the memory unit 142 can be a computer-aided design (CAD) of an object or another similar file that defines a size, shape and various other dimensions of the object. The processing unit 141 reads the data and executes the operations of the method of
Various embodiments of the invention are described herein with reference to the related drawings. Alternative embodiments of the invention can be devised without departing from the scope of this invention. Various connections and positional relationships (e.g., over, below, adjacent, etc.) are set forth between elements in the following description and in the drawings. These connections and/or positional relationships, unless specified otherwise, can be direct or indirect, and the present invention is not intended to be limiting in this respect. Accordingly, a coupling of entities can refer to either a direct or an indirect coupling, and a positional relationship between entities can be a direct or indirect positional relationship. Moreover, the various tasks and process steps described herein can be incorporated into a more comprehensive procedure or process having additional steps or functionality not described in detail herein.
The following definitions and abbreviations are to be used for the interpretation of the claims and the specification. As used herein, the terms “comprises,” “comprising,” “includes,” “including,” “has,” “having,” “contains” or “containing,” or any other variation thereof, are intended to cover a non-exclusive inclusion. For example, a composition, a mixture, process, method, article, or apparatus that comprises a list of elements is not necessarily limited to only those elements but can include other elements not expressly listed or inherent to such composition, mixture, process, method, article, or apparatus.
Additionally, the term “exemplary” is used herein to mean “serving as an example, instance or illustration.” Any embodiment or design described herein as “exemplary” is not necessarily to be construed as preferred or advantageous over other embodiments or designs. The terms “at least one” and “one or more” may be understood to include any integer number greater than or equal to one, i.e. one, two, three, four, etc. The terms “a plurality” may be understood to include any integer number greater than or equal to two, i.e. two, three, four, five, etc. The term “connection” may include both an indirect “connection” and a direct “connection.”
The terms “about,” “substantially,” “approximately,” and variations thereof, are intended to include the degree of error associated with measurement of the particular quantity based upon the equipment available at the time of filing the application. For example, “about” can include a range of ±8% or 5%, or 2% of a given value.
For the sake of brevity, conventional techniques related to making and using aspects of the invention may or may not be described in detail herein. In particular, various aspects of computing systems and specific computer programs to implement the various technical features described herein are well known. Accordingly, in the interest of brevity, many conventional implementation details are only mentioned briefly herein or are omitted entirely without providing the well-known system and/or process details.
The present invention may be a system, a method, and/or a computer program product at any possible technical detail level of integration. The computer program product may include a computer readable storage medium (or media) having computer readable program instructions thereon for causing a processor to carry out aspects of the present invention.
The computer readable storage medium can be a tangible device that can retain and store instructions for use by an instruction execution device. The computer readable storage medium may be, for example, but is not limited to, an electronic storage device, a magnetic storage device, an optical storage device, an electromagnetic storage device, a semiconductor storage device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. A non-exhaustive list of more specific examples of the computer readable storage medium includes the following: a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM or Flash memory), a static random access memory (SRAM), a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), a digital versatile disk (DVD), a memory stick, a floppy disk, a mechanically encoded device such as punch-cards or raised structures in a groove having instructions recorded thereon, and any suitable combination of the foregoing. A computer readable storage medium, as used herein, is not to be construed as being transitory signals per se, such as radio waves or other freely propagating electromagnetic waves, electromagnetic waves propagating through a waveguide or other transmission media (e.g., light pulses passing through a fiber-optic cable), or electrical signals transmitted through a wire.
Computer readable program instructions described herein can be downloaded to respective computing/processing devices from a computer readable storage medium or to an external computer or external storage device via a network, for example, the Internet, a local area network, a wide area network and/or a wireless network. The network may comprise copper transmission cables, optical transmission fibers, wireless transmission, routers, firewalls, switches, gateway computers and/or edge servers. A network adapter card or network interface in each computing/processing device receives computer readable program instructions from the network and forwards the computer readable program instructions for storage in a computer readable storage medium within the respective computing/processing device.
Computer readable program instructions for carrying out operations of the present invention may be assembler instructions, instruction-set-architecture (ISA) instructions, machine instructions, machine dependent instructions, microcode, firmware instructions, state-setting data, configuration data for integrated circuitry, or either source code or object code written in any combination of one or more programming languages, including an object oriented programming language such as Smalltalk, C++, or the like, and procedural programming languages, such as the “C” programming language or similar programming languages. The computer readable program instructions may execute entirely on the user's computer, partly on the user's computer, as a stand-alone software package, partly on the user's computer and partly on a remote computer or entirely on the remote computer or server. In the latter scenario, the remote computer may be connected to the user's computer through any type of network, including a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), or the connection may be made to an external computer (for example, through the Internet using an Internet Service Provider). In some embodiments, electronic circuitry including, for example, programmable logic circuitry, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), or programmable logic arrays (PLA) may execute the computer readable program instruction by utilizing state information of the computer readable program instructions to personalize the electronic circuitry, in order to perform aspects of the present invention.
Aspects of the present invention are described herein with reference to flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams of methods, apparatus (systems), and computer program products according to embodiments of the invention. It will be understood that each block of the flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, and combinations of blocks in the flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, can be implemented by computer readable program instructions.
These computer readable program instructions may be provided to a processor of a general purpose computer, special purpose computer, or other programmable data processing apparatus to produce a machine, such that the instructions, which execute via the processor of the computer or other programmable data processing apparatus, create means for implementing the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks. These computer readable program instructions may also be stored in a computer readable storage medium that can direct a computer, a programmable data processing apparatus, and/or other devices to function in a particular manner, such that the computer readable storage medium having instructions stored therein comprises an article of manufacture including instructions which implement aspects of the function/act specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks.
The computer readable program instructions may also be loaded onto a computer, other programmable data processing apparatus, or other device to cause a series of operational steps to be performed on the computer, other programmable apparatus or other device to produce a computer implemented process, such that the instructions which execute on the computer, other programmable apparatus, or other device implement the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks.
The descriptions of the various embodiments of the present invention have been presented for purposes of illustration, but are not intended to be exhaustive or limited to the embodiments disclosed. Many modifications and variations will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art without departing from the scope and spirit of the described embodiments. The terminology used herein was chosen to best explain the principles of the embodiments, the practical application or technical improvement over technologies found in the marketplace, or to enable others of ordinary skill in the art to understand the embodiments described herein.
