Nanowerk May 22, 2023 The constantly shrinking critical dimension in state-of-the-art technologies requires fabrication of complex conductive structures with nanometer resolution. Electrochemical techniques can produce impurity-free metallic conductors with superb electrical and mechanical properties, however, true nanoscale resolution (<100 nm) remained unattainable. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, Singapore) employed nozzles with dimensions as small as 1 nm to demonstrate layer-by-layer manufacturing of 25 nm diameter voxels. Full control of the printing process allowed adjustment of the feature size on-the-fly, printing tilted, and overhanging structures. Based on experimental evidence, they estimated the limits of electrochemical 3D printing and discussed the […]
Tag Archives: 3D printing
3D printing drones work like bees to build and repair structures while flying
Science Daily September 21, 2022 An international team of researchers (UK, Germany, USA – University of Pennsylvania, Switzerland) introduced aerial additive manufacturing (Aerial-AM) that utilizes a team of aerial robots inspired by natural builders such as wasps. They developed a scalable multi-robot 3D printing and path-planning framework that enabled robot tasks and population size to be adapted to variations in print geometry throughout a building mission. To validate Aerial-AM they developed BuilDrones for depositing materials during flight and ScanDrones for measuring the print quality and integrated a generic real-time model-predictive-control scheme with the Aerial-AM robots. The manufacturing accuracy was five […]
Researchers 3D print high-performance nanostructured alloy that’s both ultrastrong and ductile
Science Daily August 3, 2022 The additive manufacture of metal alloys by laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) involves large temperature gradients and rapid cooling which enables microstructural refinement at the nanoscale to achieve high strength. However, high-strength nanostructured alloys produced by laser additive manufacturing often have limited ductility. A team of researchers in the US (UMass Amherst, Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas A&M, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rice University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UCLA) used L-PBF to print dual-phase nanolamellar high-entropy alloys (HEAs) of AlCoCrFeNi that exhibit a combination of a high yield strength of about 1.3 gigapascals and a large […]
First 3D-printed proton-conductive membrane paves way for tailored energy storage devices
Phys.org April 15, 2021 Researchers in Japan chose mixtures of proton-conducting ionic liquids, inorganic silica nanoparticles, and UV-sensitive photocurable resins as inks for 3D printing of membranes. They found that the mixing ratio of the precursors enabled tuning of the viscosity of inks, and the inks with an appropriate mixing ratio could be applied for 3D printing. They confirmed that the inks can function as proton exchange membranes in all-solid-state electrochemical double-layer capacitors after curing by UV irradiation…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
DARPA Opens Door to Producing “Unimaginable” Designs for DoD
DARPA News January 15, 2021 DARPA’s TRAnsformative DESign (TRADES) program, which began in 2017, set out to develop foundational design tools needed to explore the new materials and additive manufacturing processes (3D printing). The program recently concluded. In the past four years, TRADES has explored new ideas from mathematics and computer science that have allowed us to now represent things – like parts and components – that are a million times more complex than current state-of-the-art systems can represent. Now it is possible to describe both shape and material in a coordinated way across multiple physics to allow intricate designs […]
3D Printing of Hypersonic Missile Swarms
Next Big Future June 19, 2019 The vision is to make swarms of up to 30 hypersonic scramjets the size of cruise missiles, launched from air, land and sea. The missiles will share data with each other, correcting their flights, perhaps changing targets midcourse. And they can be manufactured relatively quickly and for much less cost than most of the hypersonic vehicles that have been built so far. 3D Printing will make construction faster and significantly less expensive to manufacture. The weapon has completed ground testing and will fly soon…read more.
3D-Printed Graphene Scaffold Breaks Capacitor Records
Inside Science October 18, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (UC Santa Cruz, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) has made a 3D printed graphene aerogel electrode with MnO2 loading of 182.2 mg cm−2, which achieves a record-high areal capacitance of 44.13 F cm−2. the electrode can simultaneously achieve excellent capacitance normalized to area, gravimetry, and volume, which is the trade-off for most electrodes. The work successfully validates the feasibility of printing practical pseudocapacitive electrodes, which might revolutionize pseudocapacitor fabrication… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE