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Category: 3D printing

Microrobots shaped and steered by metal patches could aid drug delivery and pollution cleanup

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have created a new way to build and control tiny particles that can move and work like microscopic robots, offering a powerful tool with applications in biomedical and environmental research.

The study, published in Nature Communications, describes a new method of fabrication that combines high-precision 3D printing, called two-photon lithography, with a microstenciling technique. The team prints both the particle and its stencil together, then deposits a thin layer of metal—such as gold, platinum or cobalt—through the stencil’s openings. When the stencil is removed, a metal patch remains on the particle.

The particles, invisible to the naked eye, can be made in almost any shape and patterned with surface patches as small as 0.2 microns—more than 500 times thinner than a human hair. The metal patches guide how the particles move when exposed to electric or magnetic fields, or chemical gradients.

MIT creates a pocket-sized 3D printer that prints objects in seconds

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States have created a tiny 3D printer chip-sized device that forms the necessary objects using light in a matter of seconds.

A team of researchers led by Professor Elena Nataros has created a 3D printer that emits a reconfigurable beam of light into resin to create solid forms. This tiny printer fits in the palm of your hand. It is expected that users will be able to quickly create customized, low-cost objects.

According to the developers, the system consists of a single photonic chip measuring a few millimeters, without any additional moving parts. It emits visible light into the resin, allowing for non-mechanical 3D printing.

Faster topology optimization: An emerging industrial design technique gets a speed boost

With the rise of 3D printing and other advanced manufacturing methods, engineers can now build structures that were once impossible to fabricate. An emerging design strategy that takes full advantage of these new capabilities is topology optimization—a computer-driven technique that determines the most effective way to distribute material, leading to an optimized design.

Now, a research team including mathematicians from Brown University has developed a new approach that dramatically improves the speed and stability of topology optimization algorithms. The team, a collaboration between researchers at Brown, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Simula Research Laboratory in Norway, detailed their work in two recently published papers in the SIAM Journal on Optimization and Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization.

“Our method beats some existing methods by four or five times in terms of efficiency,” said Brendan Keith, an assistant professor of applied mathematics at Brown. “That’s a huge computational savings that could enable people to make designs more quickly and inexpensively, or to develop more complex designs with higher resolution.”

Team tackles support structure bottlenecks with dual-wavelength 3D printing

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have developed a novel 3D printing technique that uses light to build complex structures, then cleanly dissolves the support material, expanding possibilities in multi-material additive manufacturing (AM).

In 3D printing, traditional supports often add time, waste and risk to the process, especially when printing intricate parts. But in a new study published in ACS Central Science, an LLNL team—in collaboration with University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) researchers—outlines a “one-pot” printing approach that uses two light wavelengths to simultaneously create permanent structures and temporary supports from a single resin formulation.

The method addresses a longstanding challenge in AM: how to fabricate suspended or overhanging features without cumbersome scaffolding requiring manual removal, which is a key hurdle to the widespread adoption of digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing technologies.

Glass nanostructures reflect nearly all visible light, challenging photonics assumptions

A research team led by SUTD has created nanoscale glass structures with near-perfect reflectance, overturning long-held assumptions about what low-index materials can do in photonics.

For decades, glass has been a reliable workhorse of optical systems, valued for its transparency and stability. But when it comes to manipulating light at the nanoscale, especially for high-performance optical devices, glass has traditionally taken a backseat to higher refractive index materials. Now, a research team led by Professor Joel Yang from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is reshaping this narrative.

With findings published in Science Advances, the team has developed a new method to 3D-print glass structures with nanoscale precision and achieve nearly 100% reflectance in the . This level of performance is rare for low-refractive-index materials like silica, and it opens up a broader role for glass in nanophotonics, including in wearable optics, integrated displays, and sensors.

Physicists use 3D-printed spines to sculpt water surface through surface tension

Physicists at the University of Liège have succeeded in sculpting the surface of water by exploiting surface tension. Using 3D printing of closely spaced spines, they have combined menisci to create programmed liquid reliefs, capable of guiding particles under the action of gravity alone. This is a promising advance for microscopic transport and sorting, as well as marine pollution control. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Have you ever tried tilting a liquid in a glass? It’s completely impossible. If you tilt the glass, the surface of the liquid will automatically return to the horizontal … except for a small—barely visible—curvature that forms near the edge of the glass. This curvature is called a meniscus. And this meniscus is due to capillarity, a force acting on a millimeter scale and resulting from the of the liquid.

What would happen if we could create lots of little menisci over a large surface? What if these small reliefs could add up to form slopes, valleys, or even entire landscapes … liquid? This is exactly what scientists from the GRASP laboratory at the University of Liège, in collaboration with Brown University (U.S.), have succeeded in doing.