3D printer tagged posts

It’s almost time to dust off the Halloween decorations and adorn the house with all manner of spooky things, including the classic polyester spider webs. Scientists reporting in ACS Nano have made their own version of fake spider silk, but this one consists of proteins and heals wounds instead of haunting hallways. The artificial silk is strong enough to be woven into bandages that helped treat hoint injuries and skin lesions in mice.

Spider silk is one of the strongest materials on Earth, technically stronger than steel for a material of its size.

However, it’s tough to obtai...

Imagine a crew of astronauts headed to Mars. About 140 million miles away from Earth, they discover their spacecraft has a cracked O-ring. But instead of relying on a dwindling cache of spare parts, what if they could simply fabricate any part they needed on demand?

A team of Berkeley researchers, led by Ph.D. student Taylor Waddell, may have taken a giant leap toward making this option a reality. On June 8, they sent their 3D printing technology to space for the first time as part of the Virgin Galactic 07 mission.

Their next-generation microgravity printer—dubbed SpaceCAL—spent 140 seconds in suborbital space while aboard the VSS Unity space plane...

Computer vision enables contact-free 3D printing, letting engineers print with high-performance materials they couldn’t use before. With 3D inkjet printing systems, engineers can fabricate hybrid structures that have soft and rigid components, like robotic grippers that are strong enough to grasp heavy objects but soft enough to interact safely with humans.

These multimaterial 3D printing systems utilize thousands of nozzles to deposit tiny droplets of resin, ...

The technology has potential to transform how products from prosthetics to eyeglass lenses are designed and manufactured. A new 3D printer uses light to transform gooey liquids into complex solid objects in only a matter of minutes. Nicknamed the “replicator” by the inventors – after the Star Trek device that can materialize any object on demand – the 3D-printer can create objects that are smoother, more flexible and more complex than what is possible with traditional 3D-printers...