Sure, the basic idea is to separate data transfer from what I call locking. Data transfer can be done quickly, then locking can happen passively at whatever rate it needs.
Data transfer can take many forms. A simple example is an array of needles,pointing downward, forming a horizontal plane. The plane of needles is withdrawn upward through a granular material and dropplets of glue bind the material only where it should be hardened. In this example there is a resolution tradeoff, but you can see that the "printing" is basically completed in one pass of the plane through the print volume.
Holographic processes could transfer data to the entire volume at once.
The key is looking at the problem as a data transfer problem. We are very good at moving data very quickly.
The number of pins in such a design would dictate your surface roughness. Where would you be loading the glue from, if they're also being drawn through the binder.
Also, glue doesn't set instantaneously. I can see only problems with this approach?
That is the resolution tradeoff with this particular method. Each needle would be fed from a tube connected to its own control valve. Non bound material would act as support while the glue (or other binding agent) worked.
In my imagination I see a chair made from shredded tires, and bonded with a silicon caulking like substance. The shredded tires would be filled into a container between the needles as the printing array rises.
This sounds similar to HP's $100k+ solution. There's another similar attempt I've read about recently. It's a form of stereolithography resin printing.
Instead of multiple needles in a granular material it's using multiple fast-aiming lasers pointing into a tank of UV-setting resin. The lasers shoot through a tank of translucent resin from multiple angles and where he beams intersect there's enough energy to set the resin without setting the surrounding bulk of it. A bigger array of lasers means more points can be set at once.
Normal SLA/DLP resin 3D printers already work a plane at a time, drawing up through a tank and having lasers hit that layer right at the surface. A bigger array of lasers means each layer gets set faster up to the limit of the resin's minimum cure time.
Most professional and some high end hobby 3D printers aren't FFD/FMD any longer. Resin, metal sintering, and other alternatives are leaving fused filament to the hobbyists. There's no reason sintering couldn't use more lasers, speeding things up to a practical limit of the metal's time to cool.
Personally, although it's still mostly hobbyist size and speed, I just recently backed a ceramic extrusion printer. It can use a variety of cheap and readily available materials to create heat-resistant, durable, food-safe items. Items can be smoothed and some details added before firing.
For your solution, have you considered a two-part epoxy as an alternate to granules and glues for finer resolution?
Have you seen the subsurface laser engravers that create those 3d acrylic point cloud portrait things? I looked into them while doing some research on this. They basically use a focusing lens to create the hotspot at a point within the block of acrylic. They can do up to 20,000 points per second in a plane by aiming some galvos, and the material is moved slowly to create the 3rd dimension.
The granular material plus binder combinations are essentially unlimited. I even thought of making 3d printed treats by using sugar with water binder, or rice crispies with a food safe binder.
Cool thinking! The linked printer can be seen as optimized for serialized throughput, whereas in the end the total amount of data transferred is what matters.
So parallelize!
Are there FDM printers with multiple nozzles extruding in the same plane? That seems like an obvious incremental step from regular single nozzle printers.
Could also be used to accelerate the print of a single item by having different nozzles work at different parts of the design at once. Would need lots of updates to the slicer and solving some tricky optimization problems.
Autodesk's "Project Escher" was intended to do just that. The machine was built by Titan Robotics and uses Smoothieboards but the main issue is getting all the controllers to recognize where the other heads are in real time. Setting the CAM system to attempt to keep them all sync'ed doesn't always work as intended due to the way the firmware on the control board processes the incoming gcode.
