Category: 3D Printer

Researchers at Imperial College in London have developed a 3D-printing system that uses multiple drones to build vertical structures while in flight. 

By Mark Crawford

Robotic additive manufacturing methods are being retooled for use in the construction industry. There are currently two ways to use 3D printing in construction: 3D-printing structural components off site, then transporting those pieces on site for assembly, or using ground-based 3D printers to produce structures on site. But ground-based printers are limited in the size of the structures they can print.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the Swiss Federal Laboratories of Materials Science and Technology have developed a system that eliminates this scalability issue by using fleets of drones equipped with 3D-printing systems. Large and complex structures could potentially be entirely built with multiple drone-based printing systems that operate from the construction site.

 
The research team, led by Mirko Kovac, a professor aerial robotics at Imperial College, calls the new process “Aerial Additive Manufacturing” (Aerial-AM), in which a fleet of drones collaborate in flight to create large, intricate structures. A multi-drone approach allows for autonomous 3D printing under human supervision and real-time assessment of printed geometry as construction progresses. Drones can also monitor and adjust their building capabilities on the fly in real time.

Continue reading… “Drone Fleet Uses 3D Printing to Build Large-Scale Structures”

D printing can potentially be a faster and cheaper method of building homes. But it may require more than technology to take these dwellings mainstream.

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To make housing more affordable in the U.S., we need more of it. Millions of additional units, by most estimates.

This shortage of housing has a range of complex causes, but the high cost of construction — which rose even further thanks to pandemic-driven labor and supply constraints — is definitely not helping.

An idea from the tech world holds the potential to make the building process more efficient: 3D printing. Startups have been experimenting with the technology in large-scale construction, and now there’s a push to take it mainstream.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with journalist Rachel Monroe, who took a deep dive into the topic in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Continue reading… “Affordable-housing hopes are building around 3D printed homes”

University College London (UCL) have developed an exciting new 3D printing technique: “volumetric 3D printing” that lets the pharmaceutical industry customize drugs – including shape, size, dosage, and release – according to each patient’s individual needs.

BY MARK ALLINSON 

In turn, medical professionals may eventually be able to use 3D printing to “print” prescription drugs for patients in-office in the future. Not only does 3D printing promise to improve personalized medicine, but it’s also set to drastically cut cost and waste in the process. 

Solving race and gender inequalities with personalized medicine

3D printing may reduce or eliminate the problem of race and gender inequality in prescription drug manufacturing. “Currently, medications are developed especially for white adult men, which means that all women and children have an excessive prescription for their bodies”, explains Fred Parietti, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, a developer of advanced robotics technology that manufactures personalized prescription drugs.

“This fact underlines the importance of the advent of personalized medicines, as well as highlighting the individuality of each patient, since the error in the dosage of certain active ingredients can even lead to the malfunctioning of some treatments”.

Continue reading… “New 3D Printer That Creates Custom Prescription Drugs Developed by University College London”

Appearances of cultured meat models without and with treatment of natural food coloring (beet) CREDIT: Jie Sun (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)

by John Anderer

SUZHOU, China — Lab-grown, or cultured, meats represent a promising, more environmentally friendly alternative to actual meat from livestock, but high production costs have hindered its widespread use. Now, however, research out of Singapore and China reports the discovery of a way to use food waste to make cultured meat, which would reduce production costs considerably.

Cultured meat is made using animal muscle stem cells grown on a scaffold, which improves the environment for the cells by enabling transport of nutrients and allowing for the generation of texture and structure. Without this approach, the meat is more likely to end up resembling lumpy mashed potatoes.

Unique scaffolds can be created using an emerging 3D-printing technology known as Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing. These scaffolds become part of the meat product, so they have to be edible themselves, and are thus usually made using animal products such as gelatin and collagen, or synthetic materials. This is expensive to produce. Establishing a more affordable way to create edible inks for printing would be a major boon for the cultured meat movement.

Continue reading… “New 3D-printing ink could make lab-grown meat much cheaper to produce”

Efforts have resulted in very relevant retina tissue models of degenerative eye diseases

Scientists are now using patient stem cells and 3D bioprinting to produce eye tissue that will advance understanding of the mechanisms of blinding diseases. The research team from the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health in the US, printed a combination of cells that form the outer blood-retina barrier—eye tissue that supports the retina’s light-sensing photoreceptors.

The technique provides a theoretically unlimited supply of patient-derived tissue to study degenerative retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). 

“We know that AMD starts in the outer blood-retina barrier,” said Kapil Bharti, Ph.D., who heads the NEI Section on Ocular and Stem Cell Translational Research. “However, mechanisms of AMD initiation and progression to advanced dry and wet stages remain poorly understood due to the lack of physiologically relevant human models.”

Continue reading… “US explores application of 3D bioprinting to create eye tissue”

A close-up of a printed scaffold for a heart valve. The different structures that ensure the appropriate biomechanics are clearly visible.

Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Western Australia used melt electrowriting have created the first-ever 3D printed heart valve with a heterogeneous structure as is seen in human heart valve tissue. This heterogeneous property is essential to the proper opening and closing of valves, so the development holds great potential for the future of artificial valve replacement, especially in children who need adaptability as they grow.

The team developed a platform that precisely prints customized patterns and pattern combinations, allowing the team to perfect various mechanical properties within a single scaffold, as well as created software that eased the difficulty in creating complex heart valve structures.

“Our goal is to engineer bioinspired heart valves that support the formation of new functional tissue in patients,” says Petra Mela, Professor of Medical Materials and Implants at TUM and a leader of the study. “Children would especially benefit from such a solution, as current heart valves do not grow with the patient and therefore have to be replaced over the years in multiple surgeries. Our heart valves, in contrast, mimic the complexity of native heart valves and are designed to let a patient’s own cells infiltrate the scaffold.”

Continue reading… “3D Printed Heart Valves Can Form New Tissue”

New biomaterial can regenerate bones and prevent infections

Scientists at the Universidad Católica de Valencia’s (UCV) Bioengineering and Biomaterials Laboratory in Spain have created a new porous biomaterial for 3D printing that can regenerate bones while also preventing infections. The biotech creations, which are custom-made for each case using 3D printing, include a bioactive alginate coating. This coating promotes bone regeneration and kills bacteria that can prevent bone formation from being completed.

Because the material is biodegradable, it eventually disappears from the body after the bone has been regenerated. The research was conducted on small animals, specifically rabbits. The following step will be to test larger animals and, eventually, humans.

The American Chemical Society’s ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces journal published the UCV study (ACS). The work was done in collaboration with a number of institutions.

Continue reading… “New biomaterial for 3D Printing can regenerate bones and prevent infections”

Named BioHome3D, the structure was printed on the world’s largest 3D printer

By Bridget Reed Morawski

Maine doesn’t have enough affordable housing or enough workers to build more, but it does have quite a bit of excess wood fiber from its substantial forestry industry. Seeking a solution to those problems, researchers with the University of Maine have taken the industry byproduct to create an experimental 3D-printed house—named BioHome3D—they say is entirely recyclable and bio-based.

The state’s paper mills were once a reliable consumer of the forestry industry’s wood residues, according to Habib Dagher, the executive director of the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures & Composites Center, which created the 600-square-foot prototype. But several of those mills have closed in recent years, leading to a glut of the material.

“There’s a lot of that waste material now that is generated yearly in our state and in the region,” Dagher tells AD. “We have over a million tons per year of waste wood residues that are accessible to us [and] that can create a lot of homes.”

Continue reading… “This 3D-Printed House Is the First to Be Made Entirely From Bio-Based Materials”

In a conceptual rendering, astronauts watch robots 3D-print structures out of processed lunar dirt.

By Rob Pegoraro

NASA awards Icon a $57.2 million contract to develop a system to build structures on the Moon out of mined lunar dirt.

NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon include giving them someplace roomier to stay than their own spacecraft. So the space agency is paying a company that 3D prints home structures on Earth to develop the same technology for lunar use. 

Under a $57.2 million contract announced Tuesday under NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, Austin-based Icon Technology, Inc., will continue previous collaborations with NASA to develop its Project Olympus additive-construction concept into a system to build structures on the moon.

The raw material for the first such structure is already on the Moon: the surface layer of soil, or regolith to geologists. NASA’s plans for long-term exploration of the Moon and, eventually, Mars rely heavily on generating needed materials and supplies from what’s on the ground there—what it calls “In situ resource utilization”—instead of shipping everything from Earth. 

In Icon’s idea, robots will mine regolith for processing by Olympus machines into a material that can then be extruded to create structures that you might think of as exceptionally sci-fi sand castles. 

Continue reading… “Company That 3D-Prints Houses on Earth Lands Lunar Construction Contract”