An example of 3D printed food, created by one of Professor Hod Lipson’s students. Credit: Timothy Lee Photographers/Columbia Engineering
Prof. Lipson and his students have been developing a 3D food printer that can fabricate edible items through computer-guided software and the actual cooking of edible pastes, gels, powders, and liquid ingredients – all in a prototype that looks like an elegant coffee machine.”Food printers are not meant to replace conventional cooking – they won’t solve all of our nutritional needs, nor cook everything we should eat,” says Lipson, a pioneering roboticist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing at Columbia Engineering . “But they will produce an infinite variety of customized fresh, nutritional foods on demand, transforming digital recipes and basic ingredients supplied in frozen cartridges into healthy dishes that can supplement our daily intake. I think this is the missing link that will bring the benefits of personalized data-driven health to our kitchen tables -it’s the ‘killer app’ of 3D printing.”
The printer is fitted out with a robotic arm that holds 8 slots for frozen food cartridges; the students are now working on incorporating an infrared heating element into the arm. Lipson and his team are collaborating with NYC-based International Culinary Center (ICC), a top culinary school in the U.S. Working closely with Chef Hervé Malivert, ICC’s director of food technology and culinary coordinator, Lipson led several workshops to bring together ICC’s culinary creativity with the CML’s technical knowledge to create new kinds of foods – novel textures, combinations, and spatial arrangements of basic ingredients that chefs cannot currently put together. Malivert hoped to expose his students to the future of food and new food technologies; Lipson’s aim was to explore and study the potential of printed food, to create and document the student-designed recipes, and unveil what food in 2025 might look like.
Lipson and his team aim to have their prototype printing much faster and more accurately by the end of the year, and, they hope, cooking as it prints, too. Unlike conventional oven cooking, their 3D printer will be able to cook various ingredients at different temperatures and different durations, all controlled by new software being developed by Computer Science Professor Eitan Grinspun. The software is critical, since the 3D printer they have been experimenting with is meant to design and print machine parts, holes, screws, notches, cuts, and bends, not your next meal. “This is the wrong language for food,” explains Lipson. “With food you want to layer, coat, sprinkle, mix, so we need a new language so that we can describe what we want to the printer. And it has to be easy for someone who’s not an engineer to create a digital recipe.”
Grinspun, who directs the Columbia Computer Graphics Group, is creating software that can predict what a 3D-printed shape will look like after it has been cooked for a specific time at a set temperature. His team is developing a volumetric material simulator that accounts for thermal transfer and the change of material phase (the food’s viscoelastic properties) under heating/cooling conditions, in effect, attempting to replicate oven-cooking food.
3D food printing offers revolutionary new options for convenience and customization, from controlling nutrition to managing dietary needs to saving energy and transport costs to creating new and novel food items. Lipson sees it as the “output device” for data-driven nutrition and personal health, akin to precision medicine, with huge potential for a profound impact. Lipson is especially excited about working with the ICC chefs and plans to continue the collaboration. “We’ve already seen that putting our technology into the hands of chefs has enabled them to create all kinds of things that we’ve never seen before, that we’ve never tried. This is just a glimpse of the future and what lies ahead.”
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/VUvDCAG4P64
http://engineering.columbia.edu/news/hod-lipson-3d-food-printing
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