Scientists develop a 3D-printable living skin gel that may improve burn treatment and reduce scarring.
Category: 3D printing
A low-tech solution to the 6G problem—metacrystal panels offer cheap way to guide wireless signals around corners
A passive 3D-printed panel could redirect wireless signals around corners without electronics or power. The metacrystal design can handle multiple incoming waves and different frequency bands, offering a lower-cost option for hard-to-reach indoor spaces.
Basements, tunnels, large buildings—a weak Wi-Fi or mobile signal in these hard-to-reach places is frustrating. The usual solution is to add more electronics like routers, repeaters and base stations. Yet, as we move towards a 6G mobile network, this kind of complex infrastructure can be unsustainable and prohibitively expensive. Higher-frequency channels of 6G communications aim to provide vastly more data bandwidth than the current 5G, but those channels are more easily blocked by walls, people and other obstacles.
To tackle this, researchers at Aalto University have developed a new solution in the form of metacrystals: passive, 3D-printed smart panels that can shape wireless signals without electronics, a power supply or active tuning. The paper, “Metacrystals: Inversely-designed 3D-printed intelligent panels for 6G communications” is published in Nature Communications.
“When a room is too dark, you can bring in more lamps—or use simple mirrors to guide the already available light. This is what these metacrystals do, but with radio waves,” explains doctoral researcher Mahdi Asgari. “Unlike previously proposed single-layer intelligent surfaces, these volumetric metacrystals can be designed to control multiple incoming signals or frequency bands independently—a key requirement for realistic wireless communication.”
Researchers 3D print key components for a point-of-care mass spectrometer
Year 2024
Caption :
MIT researchers have 3D printed a miniature ionizer, which is a key component of a mass spectrometer. The new miniature ionizer could someday enable an affordable, in-home mass spectrometer for health monitoring. Pictured are parts of the new device, including a green printed circuit board (PCB) with orange casing on top. Under the casing is a black rectangle where the electrospray emitter is located.
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How wasted infrared light could boost solar panels, night vision and 3D printing
Researchers at UNSW Sydney have developed a nanoscale device that converts low-energy infrared and red light into higher-energy visible light, a breakthrough that could eventually improve solar panels, sensing technologies, and advanced manufacturing systems.
Published in Nature Photonics, the research addresses a longstanding problem in photonics: how to stop energy from being lost before it can be used.
That mechanism allowed the device to achieve photon conversion efficiencies of 8.2%, among the strongest reported for this type of architecture.
3D-printed ceramic implants that mimic human bone could enable patient-matched repair
Researchers at Tampere University, Finland, have developed a groundbreaking 3D-printed ceramic implant material that closely mimics real human bone. The findings advance the development of personalized bone regeneration and may lead to more effective and accessible treatments for bone defects.
The research article, titled “Biomimetic bone calcium phosphate-based scaffolds fabricated via ceramic vat photopolymerization: Effect of porosity, sintering temperature, mineralogical phases and trace elements on the osteogenic potential,” was published in Materials Today Bio.
Bone grafting is the second most common tissue transplantation procedure worldwide, with more than 2 million operations performed annually. Current treatments often rely on bone taken from the patient or a donor, approaches that are limited in availability and may involve additional surgery, lengthy recovery times and complications. As populations age, the need for safer and more effective alternatives is growing rapidly.
Low-cost 3D printers could gain medical-grade precision from ultrathin light-control film
Researchers have developed an ultra-thin optical film that improves the quality of the light used in LCD resin-based 3D printers. The advance helps ensure that tiny details are reproduced with precision, which could make it possible to 3D-print medical-grade or industrial-grade products at a lower cost.
Resin-based 3D printing, or vat photopolymerization, uses short-wavelength light to project patterns onto liquid photosensitive resin. Although this additive manufacturing approach enables highly detailed, smooth parts, some low-cost systems rely on LCD backlights that can reduce printing accuracy.
“LCD-based liquid 3D printing suffers from surface roughness or dimensional inaccuracies due to improper light angular distribution from the backlight systems used,” said research team leader Ding-Zheng Lin from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. “Our goal was to fix these problems without increasing equipment size, thereby elevating print performance to professional grade.”
Tiny forces, big effects: How particle interactions control the flow of soft materials
Sitting in a restaurant, you reach for the ketchup bottle, eyeing the basket of fries in front of you. You give the bottle a shake, then a tap. For a moment, nothing happens—the ketchup clings stubbornly to the glass. Then, all at once, it lets go and rushes out, sometimes in a steady stream, sometimes in a messy surge that threatens to flood the basket.
That awkward moment when ketchup stops behaving like a solid and suddenly starts flowing like a liquid is called “yielding.” Scientists see the same kind of behavior in many everyday and advanced materials, from toothpaste, paints and concrete to 3D-printing inks and electrodes used in next-generation batteries. Yet, what actually causes a material to hold its shape one moment and suddenly let go the next has been surprisingly hard to pin down, especially deep inside dense, opaque fluids where particle motion is difficult to see.