Transcript
Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. The tiny device could enable a user to rapidly create customized, low-cost objects on the go, like a fastener to repair a wobbly wheel or a component for a critical medical device. As explained recently in the journal Nature Light Science & Applications, researchers from MIT and the University of Texas at Austin took a major step toward making this idea a reality by demonstrating the first chipbased 3D printer.
This proof-of-concept device consists of a single, millimeter-scale photonic chip that emits reconfigurable beams of light into a well of resin that cures into a solid shape when light strikes it. The prototype chip has no moving parts, instead relying on an array of tiny optical antennas to steer a beam of light. The beam projects up into a liquid resin that has been designed to rapidly cure when exposed to the beam’s wavelength of visible light.
By combining silicon photonics and photochemistry, the interdisciplinary research team was able to demonstrate a chip that can steer light beams to 3D print arbitrary two-dimensional patterns, such as the letters M-I-T. Such shapes can be fully formed in a matter of seconds. In the long run, the researchers envision a system where a photonic chip sits at the bottom of a well of resin and emits a 3D hologram of visible light, rapidly curing an entire object in a single step.
This type of portable 3D printer could have many applications, such as enabling clinicians to create tailor-made medical device components or allowing engineers to make rapid prototypes at a job site. At about the same time the MIT group started brainstorming, a group at UT Austin demonstrated specialized resins that could be rapidly cured using wavelengths of visible light for the first time. This was the missing piece that pushed the chip-based 3D printer into reality.
The key to success is that the new system uses visible-light-curable resins and visible-light-emitting chips to create a chip-based 3D printer. So, you have the merging of two technologies into a completely new idea. The prototype consists of a single photonic chip containing an array of 160-nanometer-thick optical antennas, with the entire chip fitting onto a U.S. quarter. When powered by an off-chip laser, the antennas emit a steerable beam of visible light into a well of photocurable resin.
The chip sits below a clear slide, like those used in microscopes, which contains a shallow indentation that holds the resin. The researchers use electrical signals to nonmechanically steer the light beam, causing the resin to solidify wherever the beam strikes it. Building off this prototype, MIT researchers want to develop a system with a chip that emits a hologram of visible light in a resin well to enable volumetric 3D printing in only one step. The researchers say, “To be able to do that, we need a completely new silicon-photonics chip design.
We already laid out a lot of what that final system would look like in this paper. And now, we are excited to continue working towards this ultimate demonstration.
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