Materials make the difference in 3D printing. A good print ultimately comes down to the a harmonious coming together of materials, hardware, and software. While much of the focus today is on advanced materials including metals and bioprintable living matter, polymers remain at the heart of additive manufacturing, comprising the largest materials segment and adaptable to use in many additive technologies. For extrusion-based/FFF 3D printing, filament is the key element, and making it requires a certain finesse and focus to ensure the best quality. One Ohio-based company is increasing its focus and has seen its founders go all in on 3D printing.

At last year’s RAPID + TCT, one quick meeting during a conversation with Cleveland-based MakerGear was with Fila-Mint, headquartered nearby. It was then that I met Brian Hanzel and Amy Harper for the first time; we were recently in touch again as Hanzel invited me to the company’s new facility in Chesterland, Ohio to talk about business and check out their new line.

Hanzel, with a background in manufacturing, has broad experience throughout a variety of sectors that led him down the path toward additive manufacturing. Work in RVs, motorcycles, housing, and plastics provided ample hands-on opportunity working wth a spectrum of manufacturing equipment that afforded a familiarity with their mechanics. In 2014, he began to retrofit a line to extrude plastic into filament for 3D printing, working with Harper in their garage. The evening work, starting around April of that year, was their first foray into making filament.

“You never saw two people so excited to make a bundle of string,” he enthused as we talked about Fila-Mint’s origins.

Brian Hanzel and Amy Harper

As they kept working, they came to realize that there’s much more to materials for 3D printing than initially might seem the case; familiarity with PLA and ABS in general is a great starting point, but is truly the tip of the iceberg when taking these materials into a different sort of manufacturing technology. Soon, they accepted that they needed to devote more time and energy to their filament extrusion hobby or give up the 3D printed ghost to focus elsewhere. The demanding nature of 3D printing and precision required in materials requires attention to detail and adherence to specifications — more than can easily be achieved “making spaghetti in the garage.”

“We knew we had to do it all the way or not at all,” Hanzel explained of the start of the actual company.

Harper’s boss at the time put them in touch with a medical tubing company in Indiana, which seemed a good fit due to the precision required in the medical field.

“The equipment that we use was highly specialized to manufacture very tight-tolerance medical tubing. It has been updated to meet the specific demands of extruding thermoplastics for 3D printers,” the FIla-Mint site explains of the use for this connection.

In keeping with the all-or-nothing mindset, in 2015 Hanzel went full time with Fila-Mint. This was during the downswing of the hype surrounding 3D printing, and startups were popping up seemingly everywhere. By this time, many had already entered and exited the business, but Hanzel and Harper were determined to dedicate their time and energy to creating a viable business and a high-quality product. What started as a side project in the evenings, Hanzel explained, has become a full-time endeavor for both; Harper went full time with Fila-Mint more recently, in November 2017, having previously juggled another job with the business.

It’s not just their time commitment increasing; the attention to the business has led to growth, and Fila-Mint moved into its new facility about a month and a half ago. Going from 700 square feet of space, dominated by their extrusion line, to a significantly more spacious 3,500 square feet allows for additional room for growth.

The machinery at Fila-Mint HQ all has a personal touch on it; in addition to the updated extruding equipment, the company’s winder is a revamped metal stamping machine, which Hanzel gutted and converted into a purpose-specific machine set to precisely wind spools of finished filament. Fila-Mint has room to add on additional capabilities now, and is looking toward additional extruders, putting thought into the materials to run on them. They will be running trials soon on materials including three types of TPU, polycarbonate, and PETG; what they ultimately roll out, Hanzel noted, will depend on the feedback they get.

“Being small guys, it’s tough to know what will sell, what will work — so we’re trying them all out,” he said.

With know-how in plastics, and with the prominence of polymers in 3D printing, the team are also thinking about the potential of creating powders for SLS 3D printing, and has taken their own SLS 3D printer out of storage to look into developing additional offerings.

In addition to Hanzel and Harper, Fila-Mint has several part-time employees working to keep operations running smoothly, stocking, shipping, straightening, and assisting in day-to-day business.

As business picks up and they continue to develop additional expertise in 3D printing, Hanzel and Harper remain enthusiastic about one important part of the business: the cool factor.

“For us it’s still really exciting to see someone take our string and make something of it,” Hanzel said, discussing projects where Fila-Mint filament had been put to use.

Chesterland, where Fila-Mint is located, is no stranger to 3D printing, as local schools have been bringing the technology into STEM program offerings and MakerGear also has a production facility located nearby. Northeast Ohio is part of the growing Tech Belt region, and additive manufacturing is comfortably a part of that.

Growth continues in this area as the profile of the technology is raised — which Hanzel pointed to as a major positive for future advances.

“Had I been more exposed to this stuff, I would have headed more toward manufacturing instead of going through all those random jobs first,” he told me.

“We’re trying to do our part ot raise the profile of manufacturing.”

As 3D printing continues to take hold in the Tech Belt and elsewhere, sharing knowledge and training the next generations — as well as the active workforce — will rise in importance. Fila-Mint will be discussing 3D printing and its needs and capabilities at community events, and looks forward to attending additional larger industry events, like the upcoming RAPID + TCT.

Visiting with this young company, started from a garage and taking a leadership postiion in the community, provided a grounding perspective on the agility and democratization that 3D printing allows for in business and manufacturing. Learn more about Fila-Mint and its offerings here.

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[All photos: Sarah Goehrke]

3D printing is a wonderful tool when it comes to making elaborate costumes and props – for both professional movie studios and cosplayers alike. When Thor: Ragnarok came out last year, it owed a lot to 3D printing, in that the glorious headdress worn by the wicked Hela was created using the technology. As it turns out, that particular piece of costuming just lends itself to 3D printing, because influential designer Melissa Ng of Lumecluster was asked to recreate it by Marvel for an episode of Marvel Becoming.

Ng is not a cosplayer herself, but she has done some amazing work for cosplayers, including a stunning set of armor designed for Felicia Day. She has made other sets of armor as well, plus gorgeous masks and a lot more. She has worked with Marvel before, 3D printing Ironheart’s armor for another episode of Marvel Becoming, although usually she makes only original work.

“If I take on any kind of commission that is based on pre-existing IP, it’s because I’ve been given permission to offer my own spin on it while still honoring as much of the original design as possible,” she says. “And while the thought of sharing my own take on Hela was exciting, I was also feeling a bit nervous…There’s still pressure when coming up with original designs that both viewers and I will enjoy, but when it’s based off of a pre-existing IP, there seems to be a lot less room for you to make mistakes or alterations that fans will be happy with.”

The headdress needed to be custom fit to cosplayer Jessica Dru Johnson. It had to be lightweight and well-balanced with detachable antlers, and had to fit easily in a carry-on suitcase. It would be at a slightly smaller scale, and needed to be semi-rigid and impact-resistant. Ng also wanted to make the antlers glow, as she’s done with other pieces, but unfortunately couldn’t stray that far from the original design.

First Ng used photogrammetry to scan a bust of Johnson’s head. Then she began modeling her design, using Hela’s suit from the film trailer as inspiration to create some new details.

“Ironhead Studio’s original Hela headdress design had antlers that had a smooth surface, but I wanted the antlers to have patterns that matched the ones detailed on her suit,” Ng says. “I wanted the patterns to be visible without being overwhelming.”

The headdress had to be broken into detachable smaller pieces for travel purposes, and Ng cleverly made the detachable pieces part of the designs that she added, creating subtle inset details. Once she got the OK from Marvel, she started 3D printing. The headdress was 3D printed entirely on a Lulzbot TAZ 6, using Taulman 3D’s PCTPE material. PCTPE is flexible yet rigid, so it keeps its shape yet doesn’t break easily. The material’s strength and flexibility also enabled Ng to 3D print the antlers hollow, which made the piece lightweight and durable.

Then it was time for post-processing. Ng cleaned up the details of the antlers using a Dremel with a diamond coated rotary burr to cut through the tough material. She then filled in problem spots with flexible filler, sanded, and primed the entire headdress with a high build flexible primer – then sanded some more, and finally assembled the whole headdress. She attached the antlers to the cap (which fit perfectly on the bust of Johnson’s head) and airbrushed it in pearlescent green. She then sealed the entire piece.

“I honestly had a lot of fun sharing my own spin on Hela’s headdress,” Ng says. “It was also a great challenge to see how I could re-imagine an already gorgeous piece. Overall, I hope viewers enjoy this as much as I enjoyed creating it.”

She adds, however, that she still wants to make the antlers glow.

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2017 cars line up for the family portrait. [Image: Shell Eco-marathon]

Typically, when 3D printing is

on the

, it’s used to

and make the cars

. But when it comes to the annual

, sponsored by Shell Oil Company and held in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the name of the game isn’t necessarily speed, but

.

Many student teams in high school and college divisions compete to build, and race, a vehicle that uses the least amount of gas to complete a certain distance, and several have used 3D printing in the past to design their fuel-efficient race cars. Teams start with a single cylinder lawnmower engine, and develop design modifications to meet the goal of constructing a single-person vehicle with optimal fuel consumption.

Global 3D printing leader Stratasys has used its technology to ramp up race car performance before, and recently gave a helping hand to the Shell Eco-marathon team from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) as they prepare for the 2018 competition. A recent piece from Carrie Wyman relays the collaborative project in a Stratasys blog post.

The team’s award-winning, multidisciplinary Supermileage club, made up of design and engineering students, placed fourth out of over 40 teams in the 2017 Eco-marathon competition. The vehicle they developed, the Ventus II RS, was able to achieve 1,500 miles per gallon, and the students didn’t want to lose any momentum this year. Their goal: beat Cal Poly’s all-time school record of 2,752 miles per gallon.

Supermileage Club

The Cal Poly Supermileage team’s major focus, as they enter the design and iteration mode for next month’s Shell Eco-marathon Americas in Sonoma, is to transfer end-to-end designs from previous generations of competition and performance testing to the current club and its new race car, while still keeping the future of fuel-efficient vehicles at the forefront.

Weston Andrew Cramer, a third year member of the Cal Poly Supermileage team, said, “Essentially what we do, is kind of like what Apple does with the iPhone 6 vs. the iPhone 6S, where it’s basically the same chassis of the model, but the interior of it is remodeled to make it faster and more efficient.  That’s kind of how Supermileage operates, because making a chassis is extremely expensive, there’s a lot of analysis, and material, like carbon fiber that go into it; and of course a lot of man hours.

“So, last year, we took the chassis and redesigned it to absorb more shock and duress in general. Then, we took a look at the interior and updated the look and some of the safety elements as well. Basically every part inside the car was revamped.”

The team made two major changes to the vehicle’s interior design which majorly impacted both its safety and construction. First, they changed the race car’s braking mechanism from a hand brake to a foot brake. Then, the team members, according to the blog post, “leveraged the strength to weigh benefits of FDM materials” and chose to use Stratasys’ Ultem material to 3D print the steering wheel.

Cal Poly Supermileage alumnus Eli Rogers, who has worked professionally in the 3D printing industry since he graduated, explained that, “With FDM prints being strong in plane, instead of a more detail oriented isotropic material, like the with the polyjet.”

It’s important with any race car for the steering wheel to perfectly fit the driver’s hands to reduce stress and pain, which is why several other race cars have also 3D printed this important part. In addition, 3D printing can help make components like these more lightweight, and at less cost.

Rogers says that his collegiate Supermileage racing experience was “rewarding,” and that he can see and feel the impacts from being on the team in his daily 3D printing design work.

“At the club level, we do so much work that you don’t get to experience in the classroom, work that prepares you for a job that has stresses like a situation where the customer doesn’t know the answer, and you are tasked, as the engineer on the job, to find the answer with the best possible outcome for the customer,” Rogers said.

3DPrint.com would like to wish the Cal Poly Supermileage team the best of luck at next month’s Shell Eco-marathon Americas Competition.

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3D printing has made a place for itself firmly in the center of the aerospace industry, with the technology being used to fabricate rocket engines and components, satellites and more. Even fuel itself can be 3D printed, and that’s what graduate students at Utah State University did recently with an experiment that was sent into space this week by NASA.

The experiment was designed and built by aerospace engineering graduate students Marc Bulcher, Zac Lewis and Rob Stoddard, and aerospace engineering professor Stephen Whitmore. It involved a new type of thruster, developed and patented by Whitmore, 3D printed from ABS. Thrusters do not boost rockets into space but instead orient them in zero gravity. The thrusters developed by the USU team do not burn conventional liquid rocket fuel, but are instead fueled by the plastic itself.

“The vast majority of liquid rocket fuels used for space propulsion are extremely dangerous and toxic,” said Bulcher. “Hydrazine, for example, powers thrusters that control satellites and small spacecraft. Hydrazine is carcinogenic, expensive to make and presents many safety and environmental challenges.”

Aerospace engineering graduate student Zac Lewis viewed the launch from inside NASA’s Range Control Center.

According to Whitmore, 3D printing allowed the team to “blend and compose certain printable plastics into material that contained advantageous properties of rocket fuels.”

“We were able to engineer some fairly interesting plastics that, it turns out, made really, really good rocket fuel,” he said. “Basically, we’re printing our fuel materials out of the same stuff you would use to make Legos.”

Bulcher started working with Whitmore in 2016 and didn’t quite grasp the concept of the liquid fuel-less thrusters at first.

“That didn’t make much sense to me,” Bulcher said. “So I did some more research into the chemistry of it and was like, ‘OK, these are plastics very similar to hydrocarbon, and under the presence of heat pressure, they’ll combust.'”

To test the thrusters, the team mounted two of them to a small test frame inside the large sounding rocket. When the rocket reached the right altitude, its mid-section fell away and exposed the thrusters to the vacuum of space. The test was successful, Whitmore said, and each thruster fired five times.

Professor Stephen A. Whitmore and graduate students Zac Lewis, Rob Stoddard and Marc Bulcher

Earlier this week, NASA launched a rocket from Wallops Flight Facility carrying the thrusters as well as experiments from three other universities, as part of its Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP). The rocket flew in space for approximately seven minutes and reached an altitude of 107 miles before parachuting back to Earth and landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

[Image: Submitted to HJNews]

The next step for the USU team is to determine if exhaust from the thrusters contaminated a nearby optical sensor. If they turn out to burn clean, they could change the way small spacecraft thrusters are made, according to Whitmore. Propellants like the one they developed won’t completely replace hydrazine, he said, nor will they replace the more powerful fuels used to launch rockets, but they could represent a new cheaper, greener and more flexible way to power thrusters.

“This is the first time a USA-developed green propellant has been flight tested in space,” said Whitmore. “It’s an exciting time for us because this gives our students unparalleled industry experience, and at the same time we’re developing something that could completely change the small spacecraft industry.”

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,

/ Images: USU unless otherwise indicated]

3D scanning has become much more advanced, as well as easier for the average user. There are still issues that arise, however, between scanning an object and turning it into a 3D model. 3D scanners frequently produce models with missing areas, or holes, which is obviously problematic – no one wants a model with a big gap in it. But mesh processing software Polygonica has come up with a way to remedy the problem.

The software’s newest function fills holes by recapturing the original geometry of the 3D data, thanks to geometry manipulation. New, more efficient algorithms have been developed to improve the filling of holes so that model completion is achieved much more quickly. The Polygonica team has also developed new methods aimed at filling larger holes than other software is capable of. The combination of capabilities – filling holes more quickly and filling larger holds – is highly appealing. The performance of the software has improved significantly, according to the Polygonica team, which has tested it with different sizes and complexities.

The new and improved software includes a new fill type that can match the features on the opposite sides of a hole and extend them across the hole. This gives a better mesh result than finding a minimum area or smooth fill for the hole. The software also includes a way to fill annular holes, which are holes with one or more islands inside them, more effectively. The outer hole is filled, while maintaining the detail provided by the islands. The new fill type automatically matches features to determine which islands belong to which hole, offering great results for filling holes in challenging objects.

“We’re seeing increasing demand for processing and repairing scanned data in a range of sectors away from the specialist tools provided by scanner manufacturers themselves,” said Richard Baxter, Sales Manager for Polygonica at MachineWorks Ltd. “We are very excited by the speed and quality of these new hole filling techniques and we look forward to bringing further improvements in future releases.”

In other software news, Ultimaker has released the beta version of Ultimaker Cura 3.3, in keeping with its promises to release new software updates on a regular basis and make workflow simpler. User interface improvements include a new font for better readability, as well as a configuration/sync button and a model assistant. You can also multiply models faster than before.

In terms of slicing engine optimizations, you can now disable an extruder on the Ultimaker 3 for single extrusion prints. Prime towers are now circular, and grid and triangular infill patterns now have connected lines. You can also block support material generation in a specific area of a print, and a new experimental feature detects bridges, adjusting print speed and fan speed to enhance print quality.

Initial layer flow can now be adjusted to give the user better control, and retraction has been added to the initial travel move. You can remove retractions on layer change in spiralize mode, and faster travel paths have been incorporated.

There have been several plugin updates, as well. The plugin browser has a better look and feel, and three new plugins were added: scalable extra prime, print temperature offset, and enclosure fan. Extruders can be preheated in the printer monitor, and XML material profile files are now checked before import.

Ultimaker Cura 3.3 also comes with several bug fixes:

• Infill density now applies to both extruders instead of just one
• Fixed slice engine crashes when slicing with a material at 0 °C
• Fixed users unable to connect to a printer after losing the network connection
• Replaced comtypes modules in SolidWorks plugin with win32com to fix errors

Profiles for several third party 3D printers have been updated, including FABtotum, Dagoma, uBuild, Cartesio, Printrbot, SeeMeCNC, Velleman Vertex, and gMax 1.5.

You can learn more about these and other new features of Ultimaker Cura 3.3 here.

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The LLNL logo in 3D printed technology.

The researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) always impress with their many 3D printing innovations. Their expertise is especially apparent when it comes to their work with materials, from carbon fiber, advanced stainless steel, and other metals to reactive materials and metamaterials with shape memory behavior.

Last year, a team of researchers from LLNL developed a method for 3D printing glass using direct ink writing and published a paper on their work. The organization’s method differed from FFF 3D printing because the glass could be 3D printed at room temperature out of an ink formulated from concentrated silica particle suspensions.

LLNL has been building on this innovative research, and researchers have now successfully 3D printed optical-quality glasses that, for the first time, are on the same level as currently available commercial glass products.

“Additive manufacturing gives us a new degree of freedom to combine optical materials in ways we could not do before. It opens up a new design space that hasn’t existed in the past, allowing for design of both the optic shape and the optical properties within the material,” explained LLNL chemical engineer Rebecca Dylla-Spears, the project’s principal investigator.

LLNL materials engineer Du Nguyen and LLNL chemical engineer Rebecca Dylla-Spears.

It can be hard to make sure that glass 3D printed from the molten phase will give its desired optical performance, since the material’s refractive index is so sensitive to its own thermal history. But, the researchers explained that by depositing their material – a slurry of silica particles – in paste form, and then heating the whole print, glass is formed that allows for a uniform refractive index. This will entirely get rid of any optical distortion that could degrade its function.

“Components printed from molten glass often show texture from the 3D-printing process, and even if you were to polish the surface, you would still see evidence of the printing process within the bulk material. This approach allows us to obtain the index homogeneity that is needed for optics,” Dylla-Spears said. “Now we can take these components and do something interesting.”

The LLNL glass research team was supported by a Laboratory Directed Research & Development project, and they recently published a new paper on their work, titled “3D Printed Optical Quality Silica and Silica-Titania Glasses from Sol-Gel Feedstocks,” in Advanced Materials Technologies.

In the study, the LLNL engineers and scientists describe how they were able to successfully 3D print small test pieces, using the special ink they developed, with properties that are, as the organization puts it, “within range of commercial optical grade glasses.”

A new 3D printing technique, developed at LLNL, could allow scientists to print glass that incorporates different refractive indices in a single flat optic, making finishing cheaper and easier.

The abstract reads, “A method for fabricating optical quality silica and silica–titania glasses by three‐dimensional (3D) printing is reported. Key to this success is the combination of sol–gel derived silica and silica–titania colloidal feedstocks, direct ink writing (DIW) technology, and conventional glass thermal processing methods. Printable silica and silica–titania sol inks are prepared directly from molecular precursors by a simple one‐pot method, which is optimized to yield viscous, shear‐thinning colloidal suspensions with tuned rheology ideal for DIW. After printing, the parts are dried and sintered under optimized thermal conditions to ensure complete organic removal and uniform densification without crystallization. Characterizations of the 3D‐printed pure silica and silica–titania glasses show that they are equivalent to commercial optical fused silica and silica–titania glasses. More specifically, they exhibit comparable chemical composition, SiO₂ network structure, refractive index, dispersion, optical transmission, and coefficient of thermal expansion. 3D‐printed silica and silica–titania glasses also exhibit comparable polished surface roughness and meet refractive index homogeneity standards within range of commercial optical grade glasses. This method establishes 3D printing as a viable tool to create optical glasses with compositional and geometric configurations that are inaccessible by conventional optical fabrication methods.

Dylla-Spears explained that the team’s custom inks, which are aimed at forming silica and silica-titania glasses, allow them to precisely tune the mechanical, optical, and thermal properties of the glass.

While the small optics they printed in simple shapes were only a proof of concept, Dylla-Spears said that the team’s technique could one day be applied to any kind of device that uses glass optics, resulting in optics with compositional changes and geometric structures that aren’t possible to achieve with traditional manufacturing methods. As an example, their 3D printed gradient refractive index lenses could be polished flat to replace the expensive polishing techniques that are typically used for curved lenses.

Now that the researchers have achieved 3D printed optical-quality glasses that are on par with commercial glass products, they have filed a patent on the technique, and are already seeing interest from some large-scale glass manufacturers. As for next steps, they are starting to work on controlling material properties in order to make gradient refractive index lenses, by mixing and patterning various material compositions.

Study authors include former LLNL researcher Joel F. Destino, now a chemistry professor at Creighton University, and LLNL researchers Nikola A. Dudukovic, Michael A. Johnson, Du T. Ngyuen, Timothy D. Yee, Garth C. Egan, April M. Sawvel, William A. Steele, Theodore F. Baumann, Eric B. Duoss, Tayyab Suratwala, and Dylla‐Spears.

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If you’ve ever gotten a cut on your elbow or knee, or even on the joint of a finger, you know it’s a nightmare to try to keep those cuts bandaged. No matter how secure the bandage seems at first, it often pops right off the first time you bend the affected joint. It’s incredibly frustrating, and doesn’t bode well for quick healing. But a group of researchers at MIT has developed a bandage that actually stays on, even on joints like the knee. It sounds like a miracle, right? But it’s science!

Many 3D printed breakthroughs have been inspired by the art of origami, but MIT’s bandage, created via 3D printed molds, owes its design to kirigami, an art similar to origami that involves cutting patterns into the paper before folding it. The film of the bandage has a series of slits cut into it so that when it bends, it stretches rather than stiffening and detaching. The MIT researchers attached their “kirigami film” to a volunteer’s knee and found that whenever she bent her knee, the film’s slits opened in the center, releasing tension, while remaining closed at the sides, keeping the film bonded to the skin. The bandage stayed in place for more than 100 bends.

The researchers demonstrated multiple applications by creating not only a kirigami adhesive bandage but a heating pad consisting of kirigami film threaded with heating wires. With the application of a three-volt power supply, the heating pad retains a temperature of 100ºF. They also created a wearable electronic film with light-emitting diodes. All of the designs demonstrated the same ability to stay in place as the bandage did.

“Currently in the soft electronics field, people mostly attach devices to regions with small deformations, but not in areas with large deformations such as joint regions, because they would detach. I think kirigami film is one solution to this problem commonly found in adhesives and soft electronics,” said postdoctoral researcher Ruike Zhao.

In 2016, Zhao and colleagues were approached by a Chinese medical supply company that asked them to develop an improved version of its popular pain-relieving bandage.

“Adhesives like these bandages are very commonly used in our daily life, but when you try to attach them to places that encounter large, inhomogenous bending motion, like elbows and knees, they usually detach. It’s a huge problem for the company, which they asked us to solve,” said Zhao.

The researchers began looking into kirigami, which some scientists have been considering as a method of developing new functional materials.

“In most cases, people make cuts in a structure to make it stretchable. But we are the first group to find, with a systematic mechanism study, that a kirigami design can improve a material’s adhesion,” said Zhao.

The team 3D printed molds with rows of offset grooves of different settings, and filled them with a liquid elastomer. Once the elastomer cured, the sheets were lifted out of the molds to display rows of offset slits. The film, according to the researchers, can be made out of a variety of materials from soft polymers to hard metals.

To find out why kirigami adds to the adhesive qualities of a bandage, the team bonded the film to a polymer surface and then subjected it to stress tests. They measured the amount of stretch a kirigami film can withstand before peeling away; the results varied within a single piece of film. When pulled from either end, the slits in the middle were the first to peel open, while those at the end remained closed and stuck to the underlying surface.

Zhao identified the three main parameters that give kirigami films their adhesive properties: shear-lag, in which shear deformation reduces the strain on other parts of the film; partial debonding, in which the film segments around an open slit maintain a partial bond to the underlying surface; and inhomogenous deformation, in which a film can maintain its overall adhesion even as parts of its underlying surface bend and stretch. Depending on the application, Zhao says that scientists can use this information to design the best pattern of cuts and the optimal balance of parameters.

“These three parameters will help guide the design of soft, advanced materials. You can always design other patterns, just like folk art,” she said. “There are so many solutions that we can think of. Just follow the mechanical guidance for an optimized design, and you can achieve a lot of things.”

Zhao and her colleagues have filed a patent for their technique and are continuing to work with the medical supply company, which is making plans to manufacture medicine patches using kirigami design. The team is now looking to use the technique on different materials.

“The current films are purely elastomers,” said Zhao. “We want to change the film material to gels, which can directly diffuse medicine into the skin. That’s our next step.”

The research is published in a paper entitled “Kirigami enhances film adhesion,” which you can access here. Authors include Ruike Zhao, Shaoting Lin, Hyunwoo Yuk and Xuanhe Zhao.

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There are few organizations more exciting and inspiring than Open Bionics. The UK company has been working on the creation of 3D printed bionic prosthetic arms since 2014 – and they’re not just any 3D printed bionic prosthetic arms, they’re based on superheroes and other sci-fi characters, and have been tried out by children who definitely find them very cool and by musicians impressed by their functionality. These are complex robotic devices, which take some time to develop, but Open Bionics has been steadily working toward getting its prosthetics ready for general use. The organization signed an agreement with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to potentially help make the devices more accessible, and finally, today, Open Bionics announced that its 3D printed bionic Hero Arm, the world’s first medically certified 3D printed bionic arm, is fully ready and will soon be available for purchase.

The Hero Arm can be custom made for children as young as eight years old. It’s adjustable, breathable and easy to put on and take off, and it works as though it’s just another part of the body, controlled in response to muscle movements, which are detected by sensors within the prosthetic. It’s lightweight yet strong, able to lift up to eight kilograms.

Other features include a posable wrist that can rotate through 180 degrees, and a posable thumb that can easily pick up small objects. It also features proportional control, allowing the wearer to control the speed of the fingers when picking up delicate objects, like eggs. Freeze Mode allows the hand to be held in a static position, like when holding a glass, for example. While easy to manipulate, the Hero Arm is a high-tech piece of equipment, and shows it through a suite of lights, vibrations and sounds that inform the wearer of the status of their prosthetic.

Each Hero Arm is custom made for the wearer, and can be further customized through swappable prosthetic covers, so you can match different outfits, moods, seasons, etc. The covers can even be custom designed by the wearer. The functions of the arm can be customized, as well; different grips can be selected and configured by the wearer’s prosthetist.

Prosthetics have come an incredibly long way in an incredibly short amount of time. Not long ago, they were clunky and difficult to use, if they functioned at all – many were simply used for visual purposes. They were also expensive, especially if you wanted one that served any kind of purpose. 3D printing has made prosthetics affordable and easy to make and customize, and many, many people have been helped by the kinds of open-source, collaborative organizations that make them. However, most of these devices, while helpful, are not medically certified, which sets Open Bionics’ Hero Arm apart. The Hero Arm is a huge step in making 3D printed prosthetic devices a real part of the medical establishment and changing the way these devices are made – and priced – in the future.

The affordability of the Hero Arm cannot be over-emphasized, either. There’s a reason you don’t see many people walking around with bionic arms – they’re astronomically expensive. Open Bionics’ device, however, is affordable for the average person, particularly with the possible help of the NHS in the future.

Today is a momentous day for the 3D printing industry, the prosthetics industry, and for the millions of people who are missing upper limbs. The Hero Arm will be officially available for purchase in the UK on April 25th. You can learn more about the Hero Arm here and register interest here.

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below. 

[Images: Open Bionics]

3D printed lungs [Image: GE Healthcare]

Time and again, we see 3D printing

in the medical field to

 procedure times,

money, and make surgery 

. Using a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and CT scans, a group of researchers from 

in Córdoba, Spain, used a hybrid 3D printing technique to create lung cancer models in an effort to reduce surgery time for chest tumors.

In an award-winning poster presentation for the 2018 European Congress of Radiation (ECR), the researchers documented exactly how to make the hybrid models, and explained the advantages they provide in guiding tumor removal.

Dr. Jordi Broncano from Hospital Cruz Roja and Hospital San Juan de Dios in Córdoba, Spain.

“[Hybrid] 3D printing constitutes a novel and potentially useful technique available for treatment planning and learning improvement. Although its impact is still to be proved, this procedure could improve surgery planning, especially in complex operations,” Dr. Jordi Broncano, one of the hospital presenters, wrote.

According to Dr. Broncano and his colleagues, numerous studies have been completed that provide evidence of the immense value that 3D printed models present for implantation of devices and prosthetics, anatomic chest studies, and surgical planning and guiding of chest procedures. Typically, the models are 3D representations of MRIs or CT scans taken during chest evaluations.

CT scans are commonly performed when a patient initially presents with lung cancer, because the anatomic detail of the lungs is so great in this method. However, rather than using CT scans for staging lung cancer and detecting metastases, the researchers said that clinicians normally favor MR images.

This is the route that the hospital research team went, but instead of choosing one or the other, they went with both types of imaging to take advantage of the strengths offered by each. After acquiring chest CT scans and functional MRIs of several lung cancer patients, they fused them together to make a hybrid 3D printed model of a tumor-ridden lung.

First, the team acquired contrast-enhanced CT scans with a small field of view, which would help “increase the spatial resolution of the scans.” An iterative reconstruction algorithm on the CT scans served to reduce image noise. Then, to delineate distinct scan areas, they followed vendor-based, semi-automatic segmentation protocols.

Collected MR images of the patients’ lungs were then merged with the corresponding CT scans through the IntelliSpace Portal advanced visualization platform from Philips Healthcare, in order to fuse them all into a single STL file for hybrid 3D printing. In order to properly align the CT scans with high b-value diffusion-weighted MR images, the team had to use a rigid registration algorithm – this helped match field-of-view for datasets from both forms of imaging, and allowed them to manually fix any positioning errors in advance.

Hybrid 3D printing fuses CT scans and MR images to create 3D models of lungs. [Image: Dr. Jordi Broncano]

Finally, the researchers modified the STL file using open source

software, and 3D printed the hybrid models with a

. This allowed the team to represent the whole tumor, node, and metastasis staging of a single tumor in a 3D printed model.

Dr. Broncano and the rest of the hospital team completed a case study evaluating how much a patient-specific, hybrid 3D printed model of a lung and its tumors would actually help with guiding surgeons in the removal of the cancer. Spoiler alert – they were absolutely able to lower the amount of time the surgery took to remove the cancer by using these hybrid models intraoperatively.

After using the hybrid 3D printed models as a guide during five partial lobectomies, the team compared their results with the outcomes of 10 similar surgeries where the surgeons did not have the use of models.

The team concluded, “Despite the limited statistical power, it seems that 3D printing may have a potential and beneficial impact in the surgical treatment of lung cancer.”

By applying 3D printing technology to this type of surgery, intraoperative time was reduced, on average, by 30.6 minutes, when compared with the surgeries that did not use 3D printed models. In addition, intubation time was reduced by 30.5 minutes (p < 0.05) and recovery time in the hospital was lowered by 1.9 days.

Dr. Broncano noted, “We are registering short- and midterm follow-up [of patient postoperative recovery] at one month and three months and increasing the power of our cohort to obtain better results.”

However, while the team did not report a “statistically significant difference” between the amount of time patients spent in intensive care and their spirometric parameters with either of the surgical techniques, the potential benefits shown from this project have encouraged them to continue the study, and expand the population of it. This time, they will be evaluating any post-treatment effects that come from the intraoperative use of 3D printed models.

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below. 

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