A GADGET GEEK?S DREAM COME TRUE: PUNCH ?PRINT? FOR ANYTHING YOU WANT

Smalltimes ^ | July 25, 2003 | David Pescovitz

[sourcery]

July 25, 2003 ? Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you?re hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the ?buy? button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors ? literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours.

Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it?s a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it?s a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it?s becoming a reality.

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology ?polymer mechatronics? or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.

Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That?s where organic electronics come into play.

Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.

Canny?s co-investigator in Berkeley?s flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian?s organic circuits is ?liquid gold.? Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.

Combining Subramanian?s circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.

The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices ? for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender?s blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedded within the printed devices.

While Subramanian hones his organic semiconductors, Canny and his graduate student Jeremy Risner are designing a ?vocabulary? of mechanical components ? joints, grippers, transmission systems ? suited for the 3-D printing process.

Flexonics is still in its infancy, but the technology?s potential raises questions about what it will mean to be a consumer in an era of devices-on-demand. You?d no longer pay for a product, Canny says, you?d pay for plans. I look forward then to a generation of do-it-yourself industrial designers, tinkerers who tweak commercial product designs to improve and customize them. How will I access the fruits of their labor? Peer-to-peer plan networks, of course, where designs for blenders and mobile phones and TV remote controls are swapped like so many MP3s.

[sourcery]

FYI

[John Beresford Tipton]

This will surely make blow-up adult dolls obsolete!

[Izzy Dunne]

Anybody see the movie "Weird Science"?
Remember what those kids built with this technology?

[RightWhale]

Model-making from a printer is something we heard of 3-4 years ago in the CAD industry. But a model is one thing and a machined piece of metal is another. Still not Star Trek.

[SC DOC]

We have that beat in South Carolina. We're using printers to spit out living tissues and organs

[Hodar]

3M uses a similar technology (and has for at least 8 years)to produce mechanical samples of fairly complex sockets. For example, long before that 900 pin socket on your motherboard was around, a sample of what that socket was created. This sample was used to help work out the bugs before a tool and die machine made the production socket we all know and love. It's a fascinating process to watch. The socket is first designed in software, then lasers hit and fuse material together, inside a tank containing a special plastic resin with micro-encapulated reagants. The lasers cause a chemical reaction to take place on the near-microscopic level, making a small blob of solid plastic in a liquid plastic tank. The lasers then continue on, building the socket up from the lowest levels, until the piece is finally completed. A few hours later, the pieces are all hand assembled and delivered to the engineers to play with (and then break). Super neato... Looks like they have come quite a ways in the past few years.

[Frank_Discussion]

I would say it's approaching at about Warp 7, though. In a decade, I'm betting.

[techcor]

CNN and Tech TV have done stories on creating organs this way. Need a new liver? Print one out for you. I pity some technician of the future have to clean out some print queue because someone hit "print" for their liver a dozen times.

[redangus]

Tea, hot, Earl Gray

[L,TOWM]

There is hope that we can get you that dream date after all. Send our crack research team the specifications...

[RightWhale]

In a decade, I'm betting.

Bet, sure, but it's too soon to invest. As an addition to the portfolio it would have to join asteroid mining and the cure for cancer and whatever else ails us, not to mention clone babies. It's part of that small fraction of the nest egg that won't be missed if lost but will make the heirs go 'hmmm, maybe not so stodgy after all' when they break open the inheritance box. It is part of the asteroid mining process already, BTW.

[Frank_Discussion]

Hmmm... As a college student, I remember rapid prototyping techniques being discussed as super-expensive and built by large rudimentary devices for single-piece parts. Of low quality, too. Ten years or so down the road, I've seen functional assemblies come off of a machine no bigger than a copier machine. In different colors and with smooth surfaces. Certainly not production quality, but still very good for engineering evaluations.

Another decade will tell the tale, and it will be interesting.

[BushCountry]

Bump to read everyone's response later.

[SoothingDave]

Model-making from a printer is something we heard of 3-4 years ago in the CAD industry. But a model is one thing and a machined piece of metal is another.

We print real, functional metal parts from CAD models.

Prometal

SD

[RightWhale]

That's more like it. Tnx for sharing.

[templar]

I wonder how the Feds will controll what is being produced? (hint: think about background checking).

[Grig]

You just know where this will lead. Hackers will manage to capture the data used to create the object, then you and I could go on Kazza and download them to print ourselves hard goods. Then watch all heck break loose.

[VOA]

bump

[CyberCowboy777]

Very cool

How is structural integrity of the steel skeleton in comparison to machined parts?