Scientists have developed a multi-material 3D printing method: a manipulator with ligaments and tendons can be printed at once.

CTOnews.com, November 18 (Xinhua)-- the scientific team has recently successfully developed a new 3D printing technology, which can use a variety of different materials to print a bone manipulator with working ligaments and tendons.

The research, published in Nature, is a collaboration between researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and Inkbit, an MIT derivative in Medford, Massachusetts, to design a new 3D inkjet printing technology that can use a wider range of materials than previous devices.

The team showed for the first time that the technology could be used to print complex mobile devices made of a variety of materials in a single print job, including a bionic manipulator, a hexapod robot with a grab, and a pump modeled on the heart.

The new technology works like a continuous supply on a common inkjet printer, where the resin hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light (UV), building 3D objects layer by layer.

The principle is similar to the kind of inkjet printer you might find in the office. However, the resin emitted by the printer hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light (UV), rather than colored ink, not just printing a piece of paper, but building 3D objects layer by layer. It can also print at a very high resolution, and voxels (the 3D equivalent of pixels) are only a few micrometers wide.

This means that once the printer deposits the material, it does not require any contact with the material, said Robert Katzschman, a professor of robotics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who led the study:

This brings a variety of benefits, because now you can use chemicals that take longer to polymerize and take longer to harden, opening up a whole new space.

CTOnews.com attached the reference address of the paper as follows: Buchner, T.J.K.K.Rogler, S.S., Weirich, S.et al. Vision-controlled jetting for composite systems and robots. Nature 623,522-530 (2023). Https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06684-3