3D printing - with a twist

A rotating nozzle that can print with multiple different materials at the same time has been used to print helix shapes with intriguing properties. The researchers who developed the system have experimented with printing a kind of artificial muscle and with changing the properties a length of 3D printed filament as its being printed.

[amali]

For those who are asking why the term ink is used for the material instead of filament, this is process is not fused filament fabrication. The ink is viscous liquid which is extruded, hence no melting of a filament is involved. As soon as I saw the thumpnail I could tell this is the work of Jennifer Lewis. Amazing work!

[stevez]

I think this would be excellent for use in making thin, narrow channels for microfluidics and doing chemistry, you could make the helices with a material that dissolves away when allowed to sit in a solvent to make tiny, precise channels for different chemicals to flow.

[LogicalNiko]

“Smaller than a voxel” — a voxel is any data point defined in 3d space. So smaller and larger only have meaning if you state what the size is. And so if you are encoding properties such as twist rate and material injection rates at a sub-voxel level (I.e. defining data points between the ‘voxel’ data points) why not just increase amount of voxels or increase the amount of extra data encoded into the ones you have.

[welcometocattown]

this could be awesome for continuous fiber filaments, and that muscle demonstration was really neat

[rikilshah]

That is Colgate with extra steps.

PS: This is an extraordinary concept!

[harmonic]

This could allow for specific break sections like the shear pins on farming equipment. I think this is going to be amazing for stress testing prototypes!

[marsgizmo]

this is excellent progress in 3D Printing! 👏😎

[sylence]

Now replace the red and blue with continuous fibers. Then you can make composite structures that have predictable failure modes

[Max]

Nobody in fdm/fff 3d printing calls the extruded filament "ink" and they for sure don't call the smallest printable detail size a "voxel". Those terms come from completely different fields

[NGCgalaxy]

I don't know if this could be possible with molten filaments, but it would be a novel invention to combine different materials with different elastic properties. For example, a combination of a material that's resistant for compression and another that's resistant to tension

[rpfour]

"What's the nozzle size?"
"5"
"Oh wow, .5mm is great! That's amazing..."
"No, not .5. Just 5mm"

[IamTheWaveFunction]

They finally cracked the technology of rotating the machine

[drrock]

Cool! Even the nozzle looks like it was 3D printed!

[burggerbig]

I think I am lacking of imaginations of what we can use this for. I guess it's super new right now

[plinpain]

Now this is a game changer in a whole lot of ways. Remember that you could also add different type of materials as well, with similar technologies.

[CrackyCreates]

Kinda feels like they built the machine then started thinking of reasons to make it

[coreytaylor]

dont think Ive ever heard of filament being called 'ink' before. even gel resign being called ink by someone seems weird, but to the video's defense that is what the paper called it so its more the researchers either wanting to coin 'ink' for their gel resign or maybe this project was started before 3D printing became common enough that the terms used in it became standardized and switching just would have made things confusing?

[TheRandomThings]

not going to lie I'd brush my teeth with that

[massdestoyer]

1. New cooler androids
2. More impressive prosthetics
3. New type of pace maker??

[roidroid]

1:29 Yes that was a spark. These types of artificical muscles use ELECTRO-STATIC levels of voltage: thousands of volts.
One example in many Youtube videos is the "Hasel muscle", iirc they occasionally show the voltage driving electronics.