Car engines, bespoke medicines, organs for transplant, food, fashion and now even a whole street of houses… Is the all-conquering promise of 3D printing finally coming true? By Tim Lewis.
“The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution.”
As per an estimation by WHO, air pollution causes around 4 million annual premature deaths all over the globe. Considering this issue, an MIT research team launched an open-source version of an economical, mobile pollution detector through which individuals can track the air-quality more broadly.
The detector, named Flatburn, can be fabricated through 3D printing or by ordering cheap parts. The researchers have now conducted tests and calibrated the detector concerning existing ultra-modern machines and are making people aware of how to assemble, use, and interpret the data.
Continue reading “Low-cost device can measure air pollution anywhere” »
Up until now, it was still infamously difficult to include sensors in 3D designs.
Engineers might be able to create smart hinges that can detect when a door has been opened or gears inside motors that can communicate their rotational speed to a mechanic by integrating sensors into rotational systems.
Even while improvements in 3D printing allow for the quick manufacture of rotational devices, it is still infamously difficult to include sensors in the designs.
Continue reading “Revolutionary 3D-printed devices utilize advanced sensing technology” »
A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has developed a tiny, flexible robotic arm that’s designed to 3D print material directly on the surface of organs inside a living person’s body.
The futuristic device acts just like an endoscope and can snake its way into a specific location inside the patient’s body to deliver layers of special biomaterial to reconstruct tissue, clean up wounds, and even make precise incisions — an amazing jack-of-all-trades they say could revolutionize certain types of surgery.
Engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed a miniature and flexible soft robotic arm which could be used to 3D print biomaterial directly onto organs inside a person’s body.
3D bioprinting is a process whereby biomedical parts are fabricated from so-called bioink to construct natural tissue-like structures.
Continue reading “3D bioprinting inside the human body could be possible thanks to new soft robot” »
Nature has an extraordinary knack for producing composite materials that are simultaneously light and strong, porous and rigid — like mollusk shells or bone. But producing such materials in a lab or factory — particularly using environmentally friendly materials and processes — is extremely challenging.
Researchers in the Soft Materials Laboratory in the School of Engineering turned to nature for a solution. They have pioneered a 3D printable ink that contains Sporosarcina pasteurii: a bacterium which, when exposed to a urea-containing solution, triggers a mineralization process that produces calcium carbonate (CaCO3). The upshot is that the researchers can use their ink — dubbed BactoInk — to 3D-print virtually any shape, which will then gradually mineralize over the course of a few days.
-This would be good for coral reefs.
Continue reading “3D printing with bacteria-loaded ink produces bone-like composites” »
Calcium carbonate is an impressive material, in that it combines strength, light weight and porosity. Scientists have devised a new bacteria-based method of 3D-printing the substance, for use in applications such as bone repair and coral reef restoration.
First of all, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the 3D-printing of calcium carbonate objects.
Earlier approaches have involved extruding a gel containing mineral particles, which subsequently dries and hardens. Some of the resulting items have been rather soft and fragile, however, or they’ve shrunk as they dried, creating cracks and causing their shape to change.
A precise replica of the patient’s heart is created as a soft, flexible shell.
MIT engineers’ newly developed robotic heart will help doctors adjust therapies to individuals’ unique heart structures and functions. The personalized 3D-printed heart can control and imitate the patient’s capacity to pump blood.
Melanie Gonick/MIT
Continue reading “MIT scientists developed a 3D-printed heart that works like a real one” »
Researchers from the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) have created “core technology” for 3D printed smart contact lenses building on low-power monochrome displays and demonstrated its functionalities for augmented reality tools such as live navigation. The team’s research has been published in Advanced Science.
“Our achievement is a development of 3D printing technology that can print functional micro-patterns on a non-(planar) substrate that can commercialize advanced smart contact lenses to implement AR (Augmented Reality),” said Seol Seung-Kwon, Ph.D., of the team’s work. “It will greatly contribute to the miniaturization and versatility of AR devices.”
By using shaped ultrasound, researchers in Germany have developed a way to 3D print objects in one shot.
