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One major drawback of 3D printing technology has been its permanence: If flaws get incorporated into a structure – they are there to stay.
However, engineers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have now developed an ‘erasable ink’ for use in 3D printers, according to a new study in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
The new ink has been designed for direct laser printing, which generates structures designed down to the micrometre. With the new ink, tiny structures as small as 100 nanometres may be deleted and rewritten – over and over, if desired. The engineers behind the novel technology said it could lead to many new applications for 3D printing.
“Developing an ink that can be erased again was one of the big challenges in direct laser writing,” Christopher Barner-Kowollik, a chemistry professor at KIT, said in a statement.
The ink is based on the notion of reversible bonding: the building blocks the ink can be split off from one another. Parts of 3D-printed structure can be erased by dipping it in a solvent. New additions can then be created where the structure has been erased. By doing this, the object can be changed repeatedly.
In order to test their novel ink, the researchers designed special 3D printers capable of generating structures on a 100-nanometre scale via direct laser writing.
The KIT researchers noted that objects created with their erasable ink can be incorporated into structures created from non-erasable 3D-printed materials. So support scaffoldings could be generated by 3D printing and removed afterwards. It is also feasible create specialized Petri dishes for use in biology than have tiny microstructure designed for carrying out experiments. In fact, such Petri dishes were developed by KIT to cultivate laboratory cell cultures in three dimensions.
“During cell growth, parts of the 3D microscaffold could be removed again to study how the cells react to the changed environment,” said KIT researcher and study author Martin Wegener.
The study team also said it will be possible to create reversible wire bonds capable of conducting electricity from erasable structures down the road. Also, the makeup of structures might be specially design through particular ink formulations. For example, a permanent ink can be blended with an erasable ink to make it more or less permeable.
The study team also noted that 3D printing already indispensable in many widely-used commercial applications and its use is increasing.
“According to estimations, some 10 percent of all goods will be produced by 3D printing in 2030,” the study team said.
One of those ‘goods’ is expected to be buildings that people can work and live in. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently showed how a robotic system they developed could erect a building in just 14 hours. The completed circular structure measured 50 feet (15.2 metres) across and 12 feet (3.6 metres) high.
The “printer” is actually a robot with two arms: a long one for reaching and a short one that can be modified with a range of different tools.
"With this process, we can replace one of the key parts of making a building, right now. It could be integrated into a building site tomorrow," Steven Keating, MIT engineer and co-author of a paper on the system published in the journal Science Robotics, told CNN.
The technology could allow for quicker, less expensive and more versatile construction as opposed to traditional procedures, the MIT scientists said. Also, the moveable system can make a structure of any size, unlike most other 3D printers.
The MIT team said they would like to use their novel system in remote regions and in disaster relief situations.
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