When 3D printing, you want to be able to produce different line thicknesses. If you’re the Liqtra company, the solution would seem to be to combine seven print heads, set one of them to print thin lines, all of them to print thick lines, and something in between to print everything else.
Although there are few technical details, you can get a general idea from the video and some images below.
There are some clear advantages and disadvantages.
Considering that you are essentially laying down seven tracks at once,
you would anticipate that for the right kind of part, this would be quick.
If you have to use the maximum width of each nozzle to prevent gaps,
the drawback is that your track width varies in fairly coarse steps.
Because it photographs well, the demonstrations and images use a variety of filament colours,
but you would probably only need seven spools of the same material in real-world applications.
The good news is that, in situations where it matters, you could 3dprint with just one nozzle.
We presume that each nozzle will be the same size, which will limit the practical layer height, but that is a small price to pay.
However, as we already mentioned, this will depend on the particular printed part. The company claims a much faster print. They also assert that the strength between layers increases, which we found unexpected. For home users, this is probably overkill, but we imagine that those attempting to print in large quantities for a production line might find this to be an interesting technology.
Although it’s no longer unusual to have multiple extruders in one or more nozzles, we don’t recall seeing this method used with a home-built 3d printer.
It appears that you could experiment fairly easily with this type of technology. Naturally, there are numerous methods for accelerating production.
Source: youtube, Hackaday
