After about 11 years of work, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Ashok Chand Mathur a patent for his fast 3-D printer. The project began around 2015, when he sought to keep his mind active by learning something new. A U.S.-based organisation’s challenge to conceptualise a printer that could operate ten times faster caught his attention. His only prior exposure to 3-D printing was watching a printer in a U.S. library for about 40 minutes, but he viewed the challenge as an opportunity to learn.
He believes that pursuing a tenfold improvement requires questioning established assumptions, rather than being constrained by conventional approaches. As he puts it, “Lack of knowledge is an advantage when you are doing a 10X exercise.”
His approach drew on an earlier interest in printing developed during his time at IIM Ahmedabad (1969–71). Under the guidance of Prof. J. G. Krishnayya and lab assistants Narayan Murthy, M. G. Apparao, and the late Prof. Subhash Bhatnagar, Mathur learnt to translate pixels into codes and formulas and print rather juvenile pictures drawn by my batchmate Shantikam Hazarika.
Conventional 3-D printing builds images or objects through successive printing operations. Mathur’s approach uses prefabricated shapes to print multiple pixels at once. Drawing on mathematical principles, he identified three basic shapes—a rod, a block, and an arc—and devised algorithms to print straight lines, curves, and larger surfaces. His design also allows multiple print heads to operate simultaneously across the print bed.
Mathur intends to sell the patent to the highest bidder, leaving the commercialisation strategy to the buyer. One potential market is industrial rapid prototyping. According to Mathur, his printer can operate about 80 times faster than conventional 3-D printers, reducing an eight-hour job to six minutes.
He also envisages potential medical applications, including the rapid production of customised large bones and half-hip components for trauma care. These applications would require appropriate technical and clinical validation.
