3D Printing Can Currently Fabricate Customized Sensors For Robots, Pacemakers, And More
A newly-developed 3D printing method could be utilized to cost-effectively create customized electronic ‘machines’ the size of insects which allow advanced applications in robotics, medical tools, and others.
The impact of the discovery of the 3D printing technique
The breakthrough is observed as a strong game-changer for fabricating chip-based microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). These mini-machines are mass-fabricated in big quantities for many electronic materials, including smartphones and cars, where they supply positioning accuracy. However, for more specialized fabrication of sensors in smaller volumes, like accelerometers for aircraft and vibration sensors for industrial machinery, MEMS technologies require costly customization.
Frank Niklaus, who oriented the study at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, states the recent 3D printing method, which was disclosed in Nature Microsystems & Nanoengineering, offers a manner to get around the limitations of conventional MEMS production.
“The costs of fabricating process development and device design optimizations do not gradually decrease for lesser manufacturing quantities,” he states. The outcome is engineers are faced with a option of suboptimal off-the-shelf MEMS tools or economically unviable start-up costs.
Other low-quantities materials that could profit from the method include motion and vibration control units for robots and industrial tools, and wind turbines.
Printer created “stencils”
The investigators built on a process named two-photon polymerization. This process can generate high-resolution objects as small as few hundreds of nanometers in dimension but incapable of sensing functionality. The method uses a strategy denominated shadow-masking to generate the transducing elements, which functions like a stencil. On the 3D-printed framework, they manufacture features with a T-shaped cross-section, that functions like umbrellas. They, after that, deposit metal from above. And as an outcome, the sides of the T-shaped features are not coated with the metal. This signifies the metal on the top of the T is electrically separated from the rest of the framework.
With this technique, he states it takes only a few hours to produce a dozen or so custom designed MEMS accelerometers utilizing relatively inexpensive commercial fabricating tools. The technique can be utilized for prototyping MEMS tools and fabricating small- and medium-sized batches of tens of thousands to few thousand MEMS sensors yearly in an economically viable manner, he states.
Reduced start-up costs
“This is something that has not been attainable up to now, because the start-up costs for fabricating a MEMS product utilizing conventional semiconductor technology are on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars and the lead times are many months or even more,” he states. “The novel abilities provided by 3D-printed MEMS could result in a novel paradigm in MEMS and sensor fabricating .
“Scalability is not merely one benefit in MEMS manufacturing; it is a need. This technique would permit the manufacture of many types new, customized devices.”
Read the original article on KTH
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