New high-speed microscale 3D printing technique
3D-printed microscopic particles, so small that to the naked eye they look like dust, have applications in drug and vaccine delivery, microelectronics, microfluidics, and abrasives for intricate manufacturing. However, the need for precise coordination between light delivery, stage movement, and resin properties makes scalable fabrication of such custom microscale particles challenging. Now, researchers at Stanford University have introduced a more efficient processing technique that can print up to 1 million highly detailed and customizable microscale particles a day. "We can now create much more complex shapes down to the microscopic scale, at speeds that have not been shown for particle fabrication previously, and out of a wide range of materials," said Jason Kronenfeld, Ph.D. candidate in the DeSimone lab at Stanford and lead author of the paper that details this process, published today in Nature.
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