As an elder Millennial, I’ve had a front-row seat to the evolution of the 3D printer. Like the computer before it, I’ve watched the 3D printer change over time from a cumbersome, industrial device that could only be operated by a select few with the right skills and knowledge, to a family-friendly desktop version that makes rapid prototyping accessible to everyone. If the 3D printer follows the computer’s trajectory, then the next logical step will be to improve portability while decreasing size until everyone has a 3D printer in their pocket. It might sound impossible now, but researchers are already engineering a model that can fit in the palm of your hand. In fact, this latest 3D printer is no bigger than a coin.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Texas at Austin have teamed up to make big technological innovations on a small scale. The team has combined the fields of silicon photonics and photochemistry to create the first chip-based, non-mechanical 3D printer. This compact, portable, and inexpensive printer has the potential to change how we view the entire technology.
The team outlines their latest innovation in a paper titled “Silicon-photonics-enabled chip-based 3D printer” that was published in Light: Science & Applications. In an excerpt from the piece, the team writes: “The field of silicon photonics has the potential to enable a paradigm-shifting solution to address this need for a next-generation 3D-printing technology. By leveraging scalable CMOS fabrication techniques to enable chip-based optical microsystems with new functionalities, improved system performance, decreased cost, and reduced size, weight, and power, silicon photonics has enabled next-generation optical technologies that have facilitated revolutionary advances for numerous fields spanning science and engineering, including computing, communications, sensing, and quantum engineering. An emerging class of integrated photonic systems is integrated optical phased arrays, which consist of an array of on-chip optical antennas fed with controlled phases and amplitudes using an integrated photonic circuit, enabling emission and dynamic control of free-space radiated light in a compact form factor, at low costs, and in a non-mechanical way.”
Here's how it works. The 3D printer consists of only a single millimeter-scale photonic chip. The device works by emitting reconfigurable beams of light into a well of resin. The resin then cures into a solid shape when it is hit by light. In the future, the team hopes to have a photonic chip located at the bottom of the resin will. The chip will then emit a hologram of visible light, allowing the device to rapidly cure an entire object in a single step.
In a recent article for MIT News, author Adam Zewe writes: “The prototype chip has no moving parts, instead relying on an array of tiny optical antennas to steer a beam of light. The beam projects up into a liquid resin that has been designed to rapidly cure when exposed to the beam’s wavelength of visible light. By combining silicon photonics and photochemistry, the interdisciplinary research team was able to demonstrate a chip that can steer light beams to 3D print arbitrary two-dimensional patterns, including the letters M-I-T. Shapes can be fully formed in a matter of seconds.”
Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, was recently quoted on the evolution of 3D printing. “This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is. It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable. It is exciting to think about the new applications that could come out of this and how the field of 3D printing could change.”
The Lighter Side of Manufacturing
Created by the editors of Plant Services and New Equipment Digest, The Lighter Side of Manufacturing is a feel-good blog that showcases how advances in science, math, engineering, and technology are making our world more whimsical. Here’s another post that is guaranteed to brighten your day.
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VERO is a four-legged robot vacuum that can identify and suck up cigarette butts on a beach.