Posts Tagged ‘printers’
World’s Smallest 3-D Printer Could Find Its Way Into Your Home
3-D printer manufacturers sometimes think big, but there's just as much of a movement to think small, to bring this sort of fabrication to the masses. Our roundup of includes both--Enrico Dini may want to put a 3-D printer on the Moon to , but Hod Lipson wants . This project, hailing from Vienna, is more in the second group.
The university claims this is the world's smallest 3-D printer, designed to print with a special kind of synthetic resin that instantly and precisely hardens when hit with an intense beam of light. That gives it the ability to print very intricate as well as very sturdy objects. It uses a focused beam of light, hardening layers only a twentieth of a millimeter thick, which is delicate enough that the university says it can be used to print finicky objects like hearing aid parts.
The team says the prototype is "no bigger than a carton of milk," about 3.3 pounds in weight, and can be sold for 1200 Euros (about $1,700 USD). The size and price are both flexible, and could go down if the printer sees mass demand. No word on whether they'll attempt any sort of mass production, but this is a pretty intriguing look at our future. It's not hard to imagine a 3-D printer on every counter, alongside the food processor and coffee machine. In fact, it's great fun to imagine that.
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Tiny Titanium Origami Highlights New Method Of Micro-Construction
The researchers start by printing out a flat sheet of titanium hydride. Normally, this material is too rigid to fold, but the printing process imbues the "ink" with a number of solvents that soften it up enough for manipulation. In the case of the crane, it took 15 steps to go from a flat sheet to a finished bird.
This material is malleable enough to fold, but strong enough to retain its shape once the folding process is complete. Additionally, titanium hydride can be treated after folding to become pure metallic titanium. That way, a potential medical device could be folded into the desired shape, and then transformed into a substance that the body wouldn't reject.
The scientists have just begun to explore the implications of this technique, so it might be a while before a doctor actually uses a stent or implant created by folding titanium hydride. However, Japanese legend holds that if someone folds 1,000 origami cranes, a real crane will grant their wish. So all the researchers need to do is fabricate 999 more of these, and just wish for a practical application for this technology to arrive within a year. Easy!
Inkjet Cell Fabricator Prints Healing Flesh Directly Onto Wounds
The device itself consists of a tank holding a mixture of harvested skin cells, stem cells, and nutrients, and a computer-controlled nozzle that places the cells exactly where they need to go. The spray works similar to a color printer, first spraying down a layer of fibroblast skin cells as a substrate, and then blasting on a layer of protective keratinocyte cells. Both sprays also contain a slurry of some undeveloped skin cells.
In initial tests on wounded lab mice, burns treated with the cell printer healed in two weeks, compared with the usual five weeks skin grafts take to heal. Additionally, the mice with the printed-on skin showed less scarring and more hair regeneration, as the sprayed-on stem cells better incorporated themselves into all the various cell types of the burned flesh.
Successful mouse tests have driven the Wake Forest scientists onward to tests with pigs, whose skin more closely resembles that of humans. After the tests with pigs conclude, the doctors can finally move on to human trials, and eventual FDA approval. Additionally, the Wake Forest team is working with the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to utilize this technology on the battlefield, to print shut bullet wounds and blast damage.
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