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Unlike conventional rocket engines, which require thousands of parts to be assembled, Agnilet is made in one go with the help of a 3D printing machine.

They created a cylindrical prototype resembling a Chia pet.

We can observe how far the architecture has progressed with the developing technology today. Referring to this, we have even seen houses made with 3D printing technology.

Now, a group of scientists from the University of Virginia is raising the bars of 3D printing technology by producing 3D-print soil structures which can grow plants on their surfaces.

A future kitchen appliance could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.

That is the long-term vision at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, an engineering group that uses insight from biology to research and develop autonomous systems that “create and are creative.” The engineers have spent years working to digitize and automate the cooking process.

Continue reading “3D-printed, laser-cooked meat may be the future of cooking” »

Although plant-based polylactic acid (PLA) bioplastic is acclaimed for its biodegradability, it can take quite a long time to degrade if the conditions aren’t quite right. Bearing this fact in mind, Washington State University scientists have devised a way of upcycling it into a 3D-printing resin.

“[PLA] is biodegradable and compostable, but once you look into it, it turns out that it can take up to 100 years for it to decompose in a landfill,” said postdoctoral researcher Yu-Chung Chang, co-corresponding author of the study. “In reality, it still creates a lot of pollution. We want to make sure that when we do start producing PLA on the million-tons scale, we will know how to deal with it.”

To that end, Chang and colleagues developed a process in which an inexpensive chemical known as aminoethanol is used to break down the long chains of molecules that make up PLA. Those chains are rendered into simple monomers, which are the basic building blocks of plastic. The process takes about two days, and can be carried out at mild temperatures.

99 percent of the panels were made of PET.

Do you remember the solar panels that Prof. Paul Dastoor from the University of New Castle and his team produced with a 3D printer? If you don’t, it’s an evergreen story worth remembering. Let’s dive in…

Continue reading “3D-printed solar cells are cheaper, easier to produce, and deployable at speed” »

Flexible electroluminescent devices are usually arduous to create. Liu et al report a 3D printing strategy to produce flexible and robust electroluminescent devices that can be integrated with soft robots for camouflage applications.

SUSTech.

Researchers succeeded in a 3D printing strategy to construct flexible and stretchable light-emitting devices that can be integrated with soft robots.

In recent years, roboticists have developed a wide variety of robotic systems with different body structures and capabilities. Most of these robots are either made of hard materials, such as metals, or soft materials, such as silicon and rubbery materials.

Researchers at Hong Kong University (HKU) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have recently created Aquabots, a new class of soft robots that are predominantly made of liquids. As most biological systems are predominantly made up of water or other aqueous solutions, the new robots, introduced in a paper published in ACS Nano, could have highly valuable biomedical and environmental applications.

“We have been engaged in the development of adaptive interfacial assemblies of materials at the oil-water and water-water interface using nanoparticles and polyelectrolytes,” Ho Cheung (Anderson) Shum, Thomas P. Russell, and Shipei Zhu told TechXplore via email. “Our idea was to assemble the materials that the interface and the assemblies lock in the shapes of the liquids. The shapes are dictated using external forces to generate arbitrary shapes or to use all-liquid 3D printing to be able to spatially organize the assemblies.”