3-D Printing Creates Toy Car Size of a Grain of Sand!

When you think of 3D printed objects, the last thing that comes to mind is something as small as a grain of sand. Well, you better believe it because researchers in Austria at the University of Vienna have set a new world speed record for the fastest 3D-printed nano-objects.

Their latest task was to get the printer to make a race car model the size of a grain of sand. The race car was 0.285mm in length and created in just over four minutes. Incredible! To get an even better perspective, in order to produce this car approximately 100 layers had to be overlapped of nano-size sand, each consisting of 200 single printed lines.

So what is this good for? Well, the scientists say that the technique could be used to make small biomedical parts.

The problem in the past was the time taken to do this. In fact, the technology itself is not novel in science, but what is novel is how fast they were able to accomplish the given task using their set-up and materials. In an interview with the BBC, the scientist said that "they can speed up the original process by a factor of 500 or in some cases 1,000 times."

What is this special process that is able to do create such mind-blowing things? The formal name for the process is called "two-photon lithography." What happens here, is a laser beam is focused onto a liquid resin. This laser focusing, immediately hardens the resin, leaving behind a line of solid polymer just a few nanometers wide. Generally, 3-D printing techniques build up objects by adding layers to the surface, but what makes this process different is that the laser can create solid material anywhere within the liquid material.

Specifically, the researchers breakthrough entailed improving the control mechanism for mirrors used to focus the laser, and developing the special type of resin involved in the process.

Even more amazing is that the researchers are now going to develop bio-compatible resins so that the objects they create can be used by doctors. An example application is to create scaffolds which cells could use to build new biological tissues.