3D Printing for Math Professors and Their Students

Over the past few years, the 3D printing industry has experienced remarkable innovation, making it possible for anyone with access to a computer, design software, and a good idea to become a manufacturer. Recently, relatively inexpensive 3D printers have come on the market and are being purchased by colleges, universities, and libraries. In this primer, we will describe a number of projects that can be completed with a 3D printer, particularly by mathematics professors and their students. For many of the projects, we will utilize Mathematica R © to design objects that mathematicians may be interested in printing. In general terms, 3D printing is an additive manufacturing technology. Traditional manufacturing methods start off with a block of material and whittle away unnecessary material to produce an object. 3D printing instead starts with nothing and builds up the object layer by layer, using only the material needed for the object itself. This saves on material costs and it allows for intricate designs that would be very difficult to accomplish with typical manufacturing methods. The most affordable 3D printer models are extrusion-based models, where a thin plastic filament is fed into a heating element called an extruder which melts the filament and lays down a thin trail of plastic onto the build plate. The extruder moves in the xy-plane parallel to the build plate as specified by a file read by the printer. Once the extruder has deposited one layer of plastic onto the build plate, the build plate moves down slightly in the z direction and the extruder lays a new horizontal layer on top of the previously extruded material. In this way, the printer stacks hundreds of horizontal layers on top of each other to manufacture user-designed objects. In this primer, we will focus on projects designed for use with an extrusion-based 3D printer such as the Makerbot Replicator 2. The Replicator 2 has recently become affordable to mass markets, and because of this it is one of the most commonly available models when getting started with 3D printing.