Showing posts with label 3-D Printing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 3-D Printing. Show all posts

Going Dutch


Technology is moving along nicely in some areas, other areas not so nicely, but today’s post is a good news post, so we’ll concentrate on the first. 3-D printing is back in the news and we have seen previously how easy it is to fabricate plastic objects, thus making the future for bespoke items golden as they could be at least as cheap as mass produced ones, and probably with less waste.

The medical area has received attention with soft organs, complete with built in blood vessels looking possible. The printers can also print ceramics and these parts have been shown to work as a base scaffolding for bone to grow onto.  Prosthetic parts would appear to be a “no-brainer” too.

Now the BBC reports that an 83-year-old Dutch woman has had a new jaw fitted (1). It was made by Layerwise who have a print shop in Belgium, with input from Hasselt U. The lady was fitted up with this last June and is due to have a set of teeth torqued down into it shortly so that she’ll be able to nosh and gnash with the best of them.

The printer printed out titanium powder, which was fused one layer at a time with a laser and the jaw was finally finished with a layer of ceramic. The jawbone replacement weighs in a little heavier at 107 grams, but a few packs of chewing gum should build up the muscles.

This could end the professional boxer’s “glass jaw” at a stroke. Just like breast implants have become cosmetically popular, I can envision a future with many more manly square jaws in evidence along the main drags in Tinseltown and it’s wannabe lookalikes around the world.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16907104


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Robot Spiders To The Rescue


3–D printing has the ability to build up complex units with the moving parts built-in. In other words, a machine can be printed without subsequent assembly. Alternatively, working components can be printed and then assembled into a final unit, thus providing more flexibility in the final device. The latest fun thing to be produced this way is a spider robot that can scuttle into places where sensible people would avoid (1). So hazardous toxic areas, or small spaces in collapsed buildings can be explored. Soon we’ll hear the call “send in the spiders” when the disaster response team arrives.

In a blog by Molly Cotter posted Inhabitat there are some photographs of these little 8 legged monsters fresh off the printer (2). They are printed from polyamide and are very light. Perhaps the most notable thing about these robots is that they're very cheap to produce. Cheap means disposable, so if they do the job there is no need to recover them and try to clean them up from hazardous chemicals for example.

The spider body makes the platform on which various sensors may be mounted. Small microphones, sensors or cameras can be carried into inaccessible places by the spider bots. The Institute reports that some of them can jump around (1). Currently they are being produced at the Fraunhofer Institute. I expect that Halloween there can get pretty exciting with herds of these ghostly white spider bots scurrying around the corridors looking for trouble.

Some engineers have built small robots that can climb vertical surfaces like geckos. Perhaps that's the next step for the Fraunhofer guys with their spiders. So how do they scuttle and jump? By hydraulics. Fluid pumped into the legs extends them and when allowed to flow back the springy legs recoil.

  1. http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2011/november/high-tech-spider.html
  2. http://inhabitat.com/3d-printed-robot-spider-can-save-lives-and-analyze-hazardous-surroundings/

New Parts For Old


The fabrication of complex objects took a big leap forward when 3-D printing became a practical possibility. The printer works rather like your conventional inkjet, but builds up an object layer by layer. The important bits of the object are polymerizable, that is their molecules can be encouraged to join with their neighbors to form a solid material.

The price of a printer is now down to about $10k, so still too expensive to have on our desks to print out unique toys for our kids, but maybe soon. There is a huge potential for customizable manufacturing.

A BBC report by Moskvitch (1) on the BioRap project at the Fraunhofer Institute, Stuttgart, brings some exciting news in the artificial organ domain (2). The idea is to print out the spare part with capillaries built in to provide blood flow through so that the plumbing job becomes a matter of connection.

Biocompatible materials are, of course, a must, but there is a big challenge in polymerizing these components with the accuracy and efficiency required on this small scale. The solution comes in the form of two-photon polymerization, a technique already showing great promise in micro-fabrication of bio-scaffolding materials that can be used to encourage regrowth of tissue (3).

Light initiated polymerization normally requires ultraviolet light, but two-photon polymerization uses light at twice the wavelength, which goes much deeper into a material. It can be focused very finely and so can work on the material printed to make the fine capillaries. High energy pulsed lasers are used, so the polymerization is complete.

The great thing about 3-D printing is the customizable aspect. The spare part can be built to fit exactly. With things like matched plumbing, one can imagine the day, with surgical techniques such as the Da Vinci robotic system, that the human input would be at the computer screen with just a drag and drop on a touch screen so that the freshly printed part would be slipped into place with the minimum of contact.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14946808
  2. http://www.igb.fraunhofer.de/de/kompetenzen/grenzflaechentechnik/komposite-biomaterialien/biorap.html
  3. http://www.asdn.net/asdn/nanotools/two-photon_polymerization.shtml