4D Printing: Revolutionizing material form and control

In a collaboration between MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab and Stratasys education and R&D departments, a new process called 4D printing is being developed.

4D PrintingMIT 2013

BioMolecular
Self-Assembly
TED Global, Edinburgh 2012

Self-Assembly Line
TED Conference, CA 2012

Self-Folding Proteins
MIT 2012

Biased Chains
MIT 2010

Decibot
MIT 2009

The results demonstrate a radical shift in rapid prototyping, where objects change over time to perform programmed functions, based simply on material properties.


4D Printing Project

Revolutionizing Material Form and Control with 4D Printing an Academic Project in Collaboration with Stratasys

In a unique research collaboration between Stratasys’ Education, R&D departments and MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, a new process is being developed, known as 4D Printing.

Led by Skylar Tibbits, Self-Assembly Lab Director and trained Architect, Computer Scientist and Artist, this unique research focuses on developing self-assembly technologies for large-scale structures in our physical environment.

Tibbits’ 4D Printing project is enabled by Stratasys’ Connex multi-material 3D printing technology - with the added capability of embedded transformation from one shape to another, directly off the 3D printer.

How it Works

With Stratasys’ Connex technology,

• a single print, with multi-material features, can transform from any 1D strand into 3D shape, 
• 2D surface into 3D shape or morph from one 3D shape into another. 

Objet Connex multi-material 3D printing technology is an important part of his work – and is being used extensively in this new process.

The Connex multi material technology allows the researchers to program different material properties into each of the various particles of the designed geometry and harnesses the different water-absorbing properties of the materials to activate the self-assembly process.

With water as its activation energy, this technique promises new possibilities for embedding programmability and simple decision making into non-electronic based materials. (Imagine robotics-like behavior without the reliance on complex electro-mechanical devices)

Future Applications

Although not commercially available, self-assembly is just a beginning of a whole innovative world of manufacturing with minimum energy. As environmental, economic, human and other constraints continue to fluctuate, we will eventually need dynamic systems that can respond with ease and agility. 4D Printing is the first of its kind to offer this exciting capability. This is truly a radical shift in our understanding of structures, which have up to this point, remained static and rigid (think aerospace, automotive, building industries etc) and will soon be dynamic, adaptable and tunable for on-demand performance.

Watch 4D Printing in Action!
4D Printing: Cube Self-Folding Strand
4D Printing: MIT Self-Folding StrandSkylar Tibbits was recently awarded a TED2012 Senior Fellowship, a TED2011 Fellowship and has been named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine's 2008 Design Issue.

Additional coverage from TED2013:
MIT’s New Self-Assembly Lab Is Building A Paradigm Shift To 4-D Manufacturing
Stratasys’s Programmable Materials: Just Add Water
Brilliant Robot Scraps Can Form Selves Into Anything
Researchers Unveil World’s First 4-D Printer


ORIGINAL: Stratasys

9 Ways 3-D Printing Makes The World Better

ORIGINAL: Fast Company

At last, the oh-cool at-home manufacturing toy turns into an important tool--offering people (and animals) aid on-demand.


You’ve heard it before: 2011 2012 2013 is the year of 3-D printing. The future is here! The individual will wrench manufacturing power from the global industrial complex! Basement hobbyists, programmers, and nerds unite! Anyone with the machine and the know-how can be their own engineer, designer, maker.

Sounds great, right? Still, a lot of what’s been done with 3-D printing doesn’t exactly fill me with hope about its supposed revolutionary potential. For every 3-D printed action figure and Colbert head the technology has brought into the world, you get another print-ready bong or stupidly complex corset thing. Or worse, a 3-D printed 3-D printer. (See this post for a great takedown of the hype.)

On the other hand, scientists, surgeons, and other professionals and specialists have made significant headway in applying 3-D printing as a truly useful--not just diversionary--technology. Printed organs and houses, for example, offer up immense possibilities in their respective industries. Bespoke biological parts can be materialized patient by patient for groundbreaking applications. Printable houses could signal serious architectural advances, beyond silly, self-indulgent shapes into realizing high-yield, low-cost housing. 

3-D printed prosthetics. Prosthetics is the field where 3-D printing has probably had the greatest impact, with important breakthroughs in recovery and mobility. Above: The Cortex cast prototype by designer Jake Evill heals fractured bones. The form of the cast varies with each case: 3-D scans are taken of the injury and used to determine the geometry and the distribution of the cast’s voronoi cells. The cells are denser in areas where the fracture is worse, requiring more support.

Robohand. The most promising aspect of these projects is their collaborative approach: Designer and user work together to develop a personalized prosthetic, built specifically for the user. Above, a young boy is fitted with his new and fully articulate robotic hand. Developed by a Washington-based engineer in collaboration with a South African woodworker who had lost four fingers in an accident, the Robohand was prototyped using a Makerbot and some metal joints. The designers have tested it on two kids so far and see further applications, given how easy it is to calibrate the design to each user.

So what happens when you mix the consumer-driven approach of the former with the social, humanist imperative of the latter? Ideally, you get something like 3-D printed altruism, the ability to design and make objects that improve the lives of others in a very immediate way.

Bespoke Innovations Sport Fairing. This new breed of prosthetics is geared specifically to a user’s handicaps and tastes, which are reflected in the design’s final form. Above: a fairing that’s lightweight, flexible, and durable--perfect for sports. Developed by Bespoke Innovations, the fairings are designed to wrap around an existing prosthetic limb, adding contour (plus patterns and graphics the individual can choose) that typical prosthetics lack.

Prosthetics is the first field where advances like this come to mind, and most of the following nine print-for-good projects explore the subject in new ways. We ran a piece in April that dug into 3-D printing’s “next frontier,” that is, its exciting applications for the disabled. User collaboration results in a prosthetic that’s easy to print/build and made with cheap(er) materials, so it’s more accessible to more people. But it still feels personal.

Take the Robohand, the Luke Skywalker-like appendage designed by a Washington-based mechanical engineer and prop designer in collaboration with a South African woodworker who lost four fingers of his right hand in an accident. The trans-Pacific pair worked together to produce a plastic “robotic” hand using primarily a Makerbot. They then iterated the design for a young boy with amniotic band syndrome, which left one of his hands with nonfunctional digits. The Robohand gave its young user almost full use of his hand, letting him grip a bike handle and throw a tennis ball. Best of all, the designers say it’s only a matter of printing a new shell to accommodate the boy’s growth.

Duck Receives Prosthetic Foot. The applications extend to animals too, though the feedback is…more muted. Above: Buttercup, a formerly lame duck, waddles for the first time. The young waterfowl was born with a backward foot, making it extremely difficult to walk. A 3-D printed mold was made of the proper form for the species, then cast in silicone and slipped onto Buttercup’s leg.

A temporary prosthetic of a kind, the Cortex is a 3-D printed polyamide cast that’s designed to heal fractured bones. Developed by recent graduate Jack Evill, the geometry of the cast is determined by X-rays and scans of the user’s wounded arm. The shell’s voronoi cells are clustered to support the bone where the damage is most severe. The cast’s lightweight structure is porous to encourage ventilation, another serious improvement on old-school encasing: no funky odors.

The medical assists make way for ducklings, too: A lame duck named Buttercup received a 3-D printed prosthetic that potentially saved its life. The young waterfowl was born with a backward left foot, making it quite the struggle to walk and swim. Software engineer Mike Garey of the Feathered Angels Waterfowl Sanctuary in Arlington, Tennessee, adopted Buttercup and researched ways to get his new feathered friend waddling for the first time. He contacted Novacopy, a 3-D modeling company, which developed and printed a mold for a functional duck foot. It was set in silicone, and the appendage was a perfect fit.

Project Shellter. Large numbers of homeless hermit crabs led Makerbot and TeamTeamUSA to design and print eco-friendly shells for the crustaceans. Working with a biological researcher, the team developed a shell comparable to those found in the wild, matching the natural found version in roominess and durability.

3-D printed bionic ear. Researchers from Princeton succeeded this spring in printing a functional ear prototype using 3-D printed cells. Printing allowed the team to integrate an antenna capable of picking up radio waves, while a left-and-right pair can hear in stereo. Aesthetically, achieving the shape of an ear would have been very difficult without printing.

Eagle Gets New Beak. Beauty the bald eagle had her upper beak shot off by a poacher, making it very difficult for her to grasp food. Several years after the incident, she was given a new beak, this one printed with synthetic materials and buttressed with metal. It saved Beauty’s life. Photo: Young Kwak

3-D printed jaw. Last summer, an 83-year-old woman in the Netherlands who had contracted a chronic bone infection was fitted with a 3-D printed jawbone. The new jaw, which was coated with a bioceramic layer for durability, was printed with articulated joints and cavities for dentures. It was also designed to encourage muscle attachment. The woman was able to speak shortly after surgery and able to swallow the next day.

Photo: Yorick Jansens

Paul's Kettle. A designathon in London set up designers with Paul Carter, a television producer born without lower arms or legs. Carter was an avid coffee drinker and had asked for a way to facilitate brewing his morning cup. The designers came up with a custom kettle fitted with loops on the top and bottom. Carter could then pick up and tip the kettle with his upper arms. Of course this isn’t prosthetic design per se, but it’s indicative of the reach of 3-D printed objects to help the disabled. Photo: Enabled by Design

3D printer can build synthetic tissues

ORIGINAL: OXFORD / C&ENews

05 Apr 13

A custom-built programmable 3D printer can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues, Oxford University scientists have demonstrated.

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies.

These printed 'droplet networks' could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues – such as those that use stem cells.

The team report their findings in this week's Science.

'We aren't trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues,' said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University's Department of Chemistry, who led the research. 'We’ve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other.'

Each droplet is an aqueous compartment about 50 microns in diameter. Although this is around five times larger than living cells the researchers believe there is no reason why they could not be made smaller. The networks remain stable for weeks.

'Conventional 3D printers aren't up to the job of creating these droplet networks, so we custom built one in our Oxford lab to do it,' said Professor Bayley. 'At the moment we've created networks of up to 35,000 droplets but the size of network we can make is really only limited by time and money. For our experiments we used two different types of droplet, but there's no reason why you couldn't use 50 or more different kinds.'

The unique 3D printer was built by Gabriel Villar, a DPhil student in Professor Bayley's group and the lead author of the paper.

The droplet network printer: two droplet generators, each with a glass capillary nozzle, next to an oil well mounted on a motorised micromanipulator.

The droplet networks can be designed to fold themselves into different shapes after printing – so, for example, a flat shape that resembles the petals of a flower is 'programmed' to fold itself into a hollow ball, which cannot be obtained by direct printing. The folding, which resembles muscle movement, is powered by osmolarity differences that generate water transfer between droplets.

Gabriel Villar of Oxford University's Department of Chemistry said: 'We have created a scalable way of producing a new type of soft material. The printed structures could in principle employ much of the biological machinery that enables the sophisticated behaviour of living cells and tissues.'

A report of the research, entitled 'A Tissue-Like Printed Material', is published in this week’sScience. All video & images: credit: Oxford University/G Villar. 

Simulation showing network folding into hollow ball

Human embryonic stem cells arranged using 3D printing technique

ORIGINAL: GizMag

By Leon Gettler

February 11, 2013

The human embyonic stem cells printed using the new valve-based technique developed at Heriot-Watt University

Already revolutionizing manufacturing, 3D printing technology also promises to revolutionize the field of biotechnology. While scientists have previously had success in 3D printing a range of human stem cell cultures developed from bone marrow or skin cells, a team from Scotland's Heriot-Watt University claims to be the first to print the more delicate, yet more flexible, human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). As well as allowing the use of stem cells grown from established cell lines, the technology could enable the creation of improved human tissue models for drug testing and potentially even purpose-built replacement organs.

The scientists printed embryonic human stem cells in laboratory conditions using a new valve-based technique developed by Dr Will Wenmiao Shu and his colleagues at Heriot-Watt's Biomedical Microengineering group. The hESCs were drawn from two separate reservoirs in the printer using pneumatic pressure and deposited onto a plate in a pre-programmed, uniformed pattern through the opening and closing of a microvalve. Dr Shu says that the amount of cells dispensed can be precisely controlled by changing the nozzle diameter, the inlet air pressure and the opening time of the valve.

After the hESCs were printed, the researchers conducted tests to see if the hESCs were still alive and if they were still able to differentiate into different types of cells. The accuracy of the valve-based printing method was also assessed by examining the concentration, characterization and distribution of the printed hESCs.

“We found that the valve-based printing is gentle enough to maintain high stem cell viability, accurate enough to produce spheroids of uniform size, and, most importantly, the printed hESCs maintained their pluripotency – the ability to be differentiated into any other cell type,” said Dr Shu. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that hESCs have been printed. The generation of 3D structures from hESCs will allow us to create more accurate human tissue models which are essential for in vitro drug development and toxicity-testing. Since the majority of drug discovery is targeting human disease, it makes sense to use human tissues.”

The researchers believe the technology could also be used to create artificial organs and tissues that incorporate a patient’s own stem cells, thereby reducing the risk of the patient rejecting the organ and the need for immune suppression. This would also help address the global shortage of organ donors.

To commercialize the 3D printing technology, Dr Shu’s group has teamed with Scotland-based stem cell technology company Roslin Cellab. While the development of more accurate human tissue models for reliable, animal-free drug-testing is the initial goal, the longer term aim is to use the technology to create artificially created organs and tissues that incorporate a patient’s own stem cells. This would reduce the risk of organ rejection and the need for immune suppression and help address the global shortage of organ donors.

The team's findings are reported in the journal Biofabrication.

Source: Heriot-Watt University

An award winning author and freelance journalist with a strong background in newspapers, magazines and podcasts, Leon is passionately drawn to all things innovative and unknown with a deep interest in telecommunications, environmental technology and design. When not indulging his passion for reading and writing, he can be found memorizing lines immortalized by Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax. He lives in Melbourne, Australia. All articles by Leon Gettler

Printed solar cells the size of a ballpoint pen tip are tiny, but mighty

ORIGINAL: Smart Planet

By Kirsten Korosec

December 15, 2011, 11:07 AM PST

12Comments

Startup Semprius took the transfer-printing technology it originally developed for flexible electronics and applied it to solar cells. What did they create in return? Tiny solar cells — each a dot the size of a ballpoint pen tip — able to convert 41 percent of solar energy into electricity using low-cost lenses to concentrate the sun more than 1,000 times.

The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Lab announced Wednesday it had recently validated the 41 percent efficiency of the company’s solar cells. Semprius was selected by the DOE and NREL as one of its PV Incubator (now called SunShot) companies. The startup, which began at the University of Illinois, has piqued the interest and investment dollars of venture capitalists and power gear giant Siemens. Last June, Siemens took its partnership with Semprius considerably further and bought a 16-percent stake in the company.

How it works

Semprius makes solar concentrating photovoltaics — a clean-energy mashup of solar panels and solar thermal tech — that uses mirrors and lenses to concentrate light from the sun onto super-efficient cells.

Semprius makes the array of gallium arsenide-based micro cells by growing a semiconductor on a substrate and then using a machine to rapidly transfer it to a wafer. Layers are added to create a triple-junction solar cell. This patented micro-transfer printing process allows thousands of cells to be stamped at once.

The triple-junction cells are tiny and occupy only one-one thousandth of the entire solar module area. Lenses are then used to concentrate light on the tiny solar cells.

Each solar cell’s tiny footprint and the low-cost lenses allow modules to pack more power in a smaller space. And by using lots of small cells, unwanted waste heat is distributed more easily over the cell’s structure and eliminates the need for expensive thermal management hardware, according to the NREL. The upshot? Semprius execs say it can slash manufacturing costs by 50 percent.

Solar concentrating PV does have its drawbacks. The technology tends to have more parts than traditional PV, which can add to the cost of building and maintaining a large-scale project. In other words, there’s room for companies like Semprius to use innovation to reduce costs of CPV.

A few CPV solar companies have had success. For example, California-based Amonix is supplying a concentrating PV system for a 30-megawatt solar farm near Alamosa. Its system, which is manufactured in the U.S., powers a 5-megawatt powe plant owned by NextEra Energy in New Mexico. The company also received $4.5 million from the DOE to develop a new dual axis tracking system as part of the agency’s SunShot program, which aims to cut solar costs to $1 per watt.

Photo: NREL

Related:

Peter Thiel Bets Big On 3-D Printed Meat

ORIGINAL: FastCo

The legendary VC’s investment means factory-assembled, cruelty-free, 100% natural-feeling leather may be coming as soon as next year. After that: Get ready for your first test-tube steak.

A world of animal-free animal products would be better for our carbon footprint and our rainforests, make us safe from drug-resistant bacteria and pink slime. Vegan meat is, improbably, a hot topic in Silicon Valley lately; Twitter’s co-founders recently made a large investment in a vegetable product that tastes impossibly close to real meat. While their investment whips chickeny goodness out of shredded plant proteins, a company called Modern Meadow is taking things a step wilder, culturing and then bioprinting ultralifelike meat and leather products directly from real animal cells. The company, which emerged from Singularity University’s incubator, today announced a six-figure seed investment from Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs, dedicated to supporting early stage science, putting lab-printed meat that much closer to your hungry mouth.

Chief scientist Gabor Forgacs (who appeared on Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business list in 2010) founded a company called Organovo, a startup specializing in 3-D printed, bioengineered organs. As his son, Modern Meadow co-founder and CEO Andras Forgacs, explains, this new venture is, ahem, a natural outgrowth of that one. "The idea struck us that if we can make medical-grade tissues that are good enough for drug companies, good enough for patients, then certainly we can find other applications for tissue engineering." Forgacs does seem to understand how terrifying that sounds, which is why his startup has been relatively press-shy until the announcement this morning, and also why they’re starting with wearable, not edible, products. Still, he argues that cell culturing for food is as old as, well, culture itself:

"Whether you’re brewing beer or making yogurt, you’re really doing cell culture," he says. In this case, though, the process involves

• biopsying a living animal(a relatively harmless procedure),
• isolating the desired cells
• growing large numbers of them, and
• preparing them into cell aggregates--spheres of tens of thousands of cells.

These aggregates can then become the raw material for more industrial processes.

In the case of complete organs, that process is something like 3-D printing. For calfskin--the product that Modern Meadow intends to turn out by the end of the year--it would resemble something more like regular printing or weaving. The end result will be a hairless, pre-tanned, soft, smooth, chemical- and waste-free material in any color or pattern imaginable--Komodo dragon skin purse, anyone?--ready for guilt-free accessorizing.

ANYA KAMENETZ

Anya Kamenetz is a senior writer at Fast Company, where she writes the column Life In Beta about change. She’s the author of two books, Generation Debt ... Continued

Modern Meadow

"We are developing proprietary tissue engineering technologies to produce high value, food grade animal protein (e.g. meat and hide) without the need to raise, slaughter and transport livestock. At scale, this enables lower costs and lower inputs of land, water, chemicals and fossil fuels. Our customers are first the leather industry (fashion, furniture, etc.) then the food industry with products that have near universal global consumer demand"

Four Concepts For The Future That Could Create A More Sustainable World

ORIGINAL: FastCoExist

In the next 15 years, the course of human society will be drastically altered by new technologies that we can’t even dream of. But, with enough planning now, we can push the development of those technologies toward those that make life better. These four ideas will help us get there.

Earlier this year, Sony teamed up with the  Forum Of The Future  to brainstorm four scenarios of what life will be like in 2025. Among them:

• a treadmill of "hyperinnovation" and declining carbon emissions, 
• a scenario of damaging climate change and reactive technologies (like solar paint), 
• a scenario where sustainability and strong community ties are emphasized, and 
• a world where the sharing economy has taken off on a global scale.

Now Sony and a handful of partners have come up with four concepts --

• a platform, 
• a product, 
• a place, and 
• a philosophy--

that could exist within and take advantage of these visions of the future 15 years from now.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS ACADEMY

In the future, it’s possible that nearly everything will have an IP address--your clothes, your plants, and your refrigerator will all freely send and receive data. The proposed Internet of Things Academy will teach people to use the hardware and software behind this connected world, allowing them to do everything from creating experimental economic models to public health monitoring initiatives. 

The concept of an Internet of Things--a system where the Internet is connected the physical world around us--has been around since the 1990s. We’re already seeing faint signals of its existence. In fact, a project that Co.Exist covered just the other day--the crowd-controlled ArduSat satellite --is a perfect example of what we could see more of in the future.

WANDULAR

This cloud-connected, modular device will stay with users for a lifetime, "generating a similar sort of affection and sense of personal connection as a favorite watch," according to Sony’s brief. The device can be upgraded to include motion sensors, projectors, energy generation modules, and more--all generated by local 3-D printing to minimize environmental impact. 

The device is durable enough that it ages well and so customizable that nearly everyone could fit it with a design they like. It’s the dream antidote to today’s throwaway electronics cycle, where devices are constantly tossed for the newest upgrade.

HYPERVILLAGE

The world is on track to have 75% of all humanity living in cities by 2050. What happens to the other 25%? Sony envisions the HyperVillage--a completely self-reliant but globally connected community "underpinned by the highest spec software and hardware." These HyperVillages will use technology to monitor local resources (water, fisheries, etc.) and to share "maker" knowledge with the larger world. All power is generated from community-owned renewable energy hubs, and immersive technology allows rural denizens to virtually travel to urban spaces for big events.

We’re already seeing a resurgence in "maker" culture--just visit your local Maker Faire to see how popular it has become--and projects like Alchematter (a Wikipedia for people who make things) are making it increasingly easy for people to become self-reliant. At the same time, local, independent economies are taking off, with some neighborhoods even creating their own currencies .

THE SHIFT

The Shift is more of a question than anything else. Sony asks, "Is it time to re-focus society’s relationship with technology so that it genuinely meets human needs?" Digital technology has changed the way we live, but there’s still a long way to go for it to truly revolutionize our personal well-being and connection with nature (an example of the latter is Urban Edibles , a digital database of wild food sources in Portland, Oregon). Instead, we often allow these technologies to waste our time and distract us (the average user spends 2.5 hours on email everyday), leaving little downtime to actually process what we experience.

The answer to Sony’s question is, of course, a resounding yes.