By David Ponce
3D printing is definitely all the rage, but it’s not just oddly shaped gears that are being printed. Thinking heads at the Vienna University of Technology decided to print on a nano-scale, using lasers. “The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a polymerized line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometers wide. This high resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand.” This is a technique they call “two-photon lithography.”
And while printing on such a scale is nothing new, the speed at which these researchers did it is. The race car you see above is 100 µm wide (the width of a human hair) and is made up of 100 layers, consisting of approximately 200 single lines each; it was printed in 4 minutes. The details of exactly how they did it are quite interesting and definitely worth a read at the link below. “Scientists are now developing bio-compatible resins for medical applications. They can be used to create scaffolds to which living cells can attach themselves facilitating the systematic creation of biological tissues. The 3d printer could also be used to create tailor made construction parts for biomedical technology or nanotechnology.”
[ Nano-scale 3D Printing ] VIA [ DVice ]
