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Category: 3D printing – Page 23

To produce the next generation of high-frequency antennae for 5G, 6G and other wireless devices, a team at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has invented the machine and manufacturing technique to manipulate microscopic objects using 3D printing and braid them into filaments a mere micrometre in diameter.

How small is this? One human hair varies in diameter between 20 and 200 micrometres from tip to root. Spider web silk can vary from 3 to 8 micrometres in diameter. So that’s teeny tiny. And for us to pack in the many antennae that go into mobile phone technology today, the smaller the better.

Current manufacturing techniques can’t make one-micrometre filaments. But the machine invented by the Harvard SEAS team can. How does it do it? It uses the surface tension of water to grab and manipulate micromaterials. The capillary forces in the water are harnessed to help in the assembly using the variable width channels contained within the machine. Using 3D printing and the hydrophilic properties of the machine’s walls, the team used surface tension to guide kevlar nanowires attached to small floats which as they travelled through the device plaited into micrometre-scale braids.

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More affordable than the regular ones.

The Arm2u biomedical engineering team from the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya designed and constructed a configurable transradial prosthesis that responds to the user’s nerve impulses using 3D printing technology.

Arm2u is a prosthesis that can replace a missing arm below the elbow. It can be controlled with myoelectric control, which means that it is controlled by the natural electrical signals produced by muscle contraction.

UPC

Continue reading “Engineering students have developed a 3D-printed prosthetic arm for people with disabilities” | >

The race to create a solid-state battery that could compete with today’s lithium-ion cells is heating up. In the past few years, there’s been a lot of R&D around solid electrolytes that promise to be safer and more powerful. In this video, we visit Sakuú, a company that doesn’t just want to make solid-state batteries, they also want to 3D-print them.

0:00 Intro.
0:29 Battery basics feat. a potato.
1:29 Lithium-ion batteries 101
2:18 What is a solid-state battery?
3:28 Intro to Sakuú
4:00 Why 3D-printing?
5:35 3D-printing prototype.
6:25 Customized battery shapes.
7:34 Challenges of total reinvention.
8:09 Looking forward.

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An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Korea, Australia, Great Britain, and Germany—with participation of Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT)—were able for the first time to optimize an optical glass fiber in such a way that light of different wavelengths can be focused extremely precisely. The level of accuracy is achieved by 3D nanoprinting of an optical lens applied to the end of the fiber.

This opens up new possibilities for applications in microscopy and endoscopy as well as in laser therapy and sensor technology. The researchers published their results in the journal Nature Communications.

Lenses at the end faces of optical fibers currently used in endoscopy for medical diagnostics have the disadvantage of chromatic aberration. This imaging error of optics, caused by the fact that light of different wavelengths, i.e., different spectral colors, is shaped and refracted differently, leads to a shift in the focal point and thus to blurring in imaging over a wide range of wavelengths. Achromatic lenses, which can minimize these optical aberrations, provide a remedy.

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The goal is to enable the printing of large, complex shaped structures, on any surface, using a swarm of drones, each depositing whatever material is required. It’s a bit like a swarm of wasps building a nest, into whatever little nook they come across, but on the wing.

Even in technical disciplines such as engineering, there is much we can still learn from nature. After all, the endless experimentation and trials of life give rise to some of the most elegant solutions to problems. With that in mind, a large team of researchers took inspiration from the humble (if rather annoying) wasp, specifically its nest-building skills. The idea was to explore 3D printing of structures without the constraints of a framed machine, by mounting an extruder onto a drone.

As you might expect, one of the most obvious issues with this attempt is the tendency of the drone’s to drift around slightly. The solution the team came up with was to mount the effector onto a delta bot carrier hanging from the bottom of the drone, allowing it to compensate for its measured movement and cancel out the majority of the positional error.

Continue reading “3D Printing With A Drone Swarm?” | >

A new deep-learning framework developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor, maintenance and energy are expected to accelerate expansion of additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.

“The scan speed reduces costs significantly,” said ORNL lead researcher Amir Ziabari. “And the quality is higher, so the post-processing analysis becomes much simpler.”

The framework is already being incorporated into software used by commercial partner ZEISS within its machines at DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL, where companies hone 3D-printing methods.

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A new study from North Carolina State University shows a reproducible way of studying cellular communication among varied types of plant cells by “bioprinting” these cells via a 3D printer. Learning more about how plant cells communicate with each other—and with their environment—is key to understanding more about plant cell functions and could ultimately lead to creating better crop varieties and optimal growing environments.

The researchers bioprinted cells from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and from soybeans to study not just whether plant cells would live after being bioprinted—and for how long—but also to examine how they acquire and change their identity and function.

“A plant root has a lot of different cell types with specialized functions,” said Lisa Van den Broeck, an NC State postdoctoral researcher who is the first author of a paper describing the work. “There are also different sets of genes being expressed; some are cell-specific. We wanted to know what happens after you bioprint and place them into an environment that you design: Are they alive and doing what they should be doing?”

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The form gets rolled out on a concrete slab or other foundation, then inflated with an air pump; at this point, it may look a little like one of those bouncy houses you see at children’s parties. Then a ready mix truck shows up—these trucks can mix concrete on their way to a site or at the site itself—and pumps concrete into the form. The company’s website says they can use local ready mix concrete, aircrete (a lightweight version of concrete that incorporates air bubbles instead of traditional aggregate), sustainable cement, and other “pumpable building materials.”

The concrete-pumping step is a bit like 3D printing, though 3D printed homes use concrete as printer “ink” to put walls down layer by layer rather than spitting all the concrete into a form at once. This is even faster; Bell told New Atlas, “For our 100-square-foot and 200-square-foot prototypes, the inflation took 7 to 10 minutes with air. Then the concrete pump filled them in 1.5 hours.”

Once the concrete has dried, the form isn’t stripped away; it stays right where it is, serving as an airtight barrier for waterproofing and insulation. The final step is to add all the things that make a house look and function like a house rather than a giant clay art project, that is, a facade, windows, doors, drywall, HVAC, and plumbing.

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Carnegie Mellon University researchers have pioneered the CMU Array—a new type of microelectrode array for brain computer interface platforms. It holds the potential to transform how doctors are able to treat neurological disorders.

The ultra-high-density microelectrode (MEA), which is 3D-printed at the nanoscale, is fully customizable. This means that one day, patients suffering from epilepsy or limb function loss due to stroke could have personalized medical treatment optimized for their individual needs.

The collaboration combines the expertise of Rahul Panat, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Eric Yttri, assistant professor of biological sciences. The team applied the newest microfabrication technique, Aerosol Jet 3D printing, to produce arrays that solved the major design barriers of other brain computer interface (BCI) arrays. The findings were published in Science Advances.

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