http://mainenewsonline.com/content/...-revolutionize-electronic-industry-developing
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You may soon see experts building hair-thin electronics in mid-air, thanks to a new 3-D printer developed by a team of researchers from the Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, also known as SEAS.
The printer uses laser to design and develop thin and flexible electronics as they are hanging mid-air. It was designed with an aim to produce small metal structure, rather than big devices, said Mark Skylar-Scott, lead researcher from the university's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Users always look for flexible and wearable. The new 3-D printer is going to revolutionize the electronic industry as it will allow development of small and conductive structures, Skylar-Scott stated. It is specially going to help electrical engineers as it may help them in making a model whose conductivity equals that of silver, the researcher added.
The researchers have published their work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
In a press release, the Wyss Institute said, "This technology allows engineers to produce wires and other useful components right onto their devices in a cost-efficient, space-efficient manner. Before this printer, the necessary laser heating would have damaged the other technology, but now engineers can print 'on-the-fly', directly onto a circuit board".
The problem with traditional 3-D printers was that they are very slow in developing devices. They lay down successive layers of a material, but the new printer uses a method involving laser-assisted direct ink writing. With this, users will be able to produce tiny materials in a less time, as per the institute.
An amazing thing about the printer is that it allows materials to be made quickly and durably, said the researchers.
According to a report in Tech Crunch by Devin Coldewey, "There's no fancy name for the technology yet (unless laser-assisted direct ink writing counts), but the gist of it is this: A nozzle moves along a preset path sending out a thin stream of silver nanoparticles, while at the same time a laser follows its progress, heating the particles and solidifying them into a freestanding filament thinner than a human hair."
"I am truly excited by this latest advance from our lab, which allows one to 3D print and anneal flexible metal electrodes and complex architectures `on-the-fly,'" said lead researcher Jennifer Lewis in a news release. "This sophisticated use of laser technology to enhance 3D printing capabilities not only inspires new kinds of products, it move s the frontier of solid free-form fabrication into an exciting new realm."
A report published in the Gizmodo said, "If you're not familiar with the process, 3D printers slowly build up objects layer by layer, relying on the previous layers to support all of the new ones. Objects with parts that hang in midair can typically only be created by adding temporary support materials during the printing process that later have to be removed-an additional time-consuming step, and a waste of materials."
What the researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have come up with is a special ink made of silver nanoparticles that can be hardened using using a precisely focused laser as it's being extruded from a nozzle. It's a technique similar to what 3D printing pens use, except that instead of plastic filament that immediately hardens as it cools, Harvard's printer creates objects from dur able metal.
"The laser-assisted direct ink writing method prints microscopic metallic, free-standing 3-D structures in one step, without auxiliary support material. The research was led by Wyss core faculty member Jennifer Lewis, who is also the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at SEAS," according to a news report published by Harvard News.
"If the laser gets too close to the nozzle during printing, heat is conducted upstream, which clogs the nozzle with solidified ink," said Skylar-Scott. "To address this, we devised a heat transfer model to account for temperature distribution along a given silver-wire pattern, allowing us to modulate the printing speed and distance between the nozzle and laser to elegantly control the laser annealing process `on the fly."
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