88 Can you give a definition of plastic ? In 2015, Danit Peleg, an Israeli fashion designer, became the first designer to create a clothing line entirely made by 3D printing. 3D PRINTING Additive manufacturing 3D printing is a process which allows technicians to create three-dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The entire process is also called additive manufacturing because it is achieved by adding successive layers of material to create a final product. In the last few years, this technique has improved to the point that it is now considered as a fundamental industrialproduction technology, especially because the material range and the accuracy in the process have been highly increased. The 3D printing process The process works by extruding liquefied plastic material through a very tiny nozzle at the end of a robotic arm which moves under computer control. These are the different steps of the process: a blueprint of the object is created using specific software; the design is sent to the printer; a string of the desired material is introduced into the dispenser; ONLINE RESOURCES 3D functional lattices to reduce pollution blueprint: progetto to cool: raffreddarsi to extrude: estrudere layer: strato 208 MECHANICS when the printer microcontroller receives the data from the computer, it melts the plastic string in the extruder hot end and deposits it onto the plate where it immediately cools; the 3D object is created by adding one plastic layer at a time until the final structure is fully done. Materials Different materials require different 3D printing processes: resins are fused with lasers; thermoplastics (plastic polymer material that becomes flexible at a certain high temperature and solidifies when cool) are extruded through a process called Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), which is a continuous filament of melted plastic material; metal filled filaments are made by mixing a fine metal powder into a plastic material and then fused with lasers. Applications The most common application for 3D printing is rapid prototyping. The main advantage of this application is its ability to quickly and cost-effectively create physical models from digital designs. Nowadays, 3D printing can be applied in an incredibly large number of fields. Here are some examples: biomedical: organ, implants, and protheses printing; aerospace and automotive: prototypes and parts of vehicles or aircraft; fashion: clothing and accessories; architecture: prototypes of complex structures.