Remember when putting colour on paper was revolutionary? Things are a bit more advanced now
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Illustration: Si Mithcell
What is 3D printing? It seems like something out of a science fiction film to most people...
It’s a very simple principle. To make a 3D object, you create it layer by layer. You deposit 2D slices on top of each other and those 2D slices can have different shapes, so when you stack them you create a 3D object. The advantage to it is that you can manufacture a great deal of shapes and geometries that you can’t do by traditional manufacturing means. By traditional, I mean subtracting material away from a block to create a shape and then sculpting it, or you might injection mould or some other technology.
What are the types of materials used for the majority of 3D printing?
There’s quite a range. The kind of 3D printing you might have seen on TV is just a small part of it. Those little machines, they are a polymer or plastic, but we can use metals and different types of polymers. We have 3D printed silicones, acrylates, polyurethane, nylon, but even the printing of tissues, cells and other biological materials is possible.
You can actually print with biological cells? Are you talking about skin cells or plant matter when you say that?
Tissue engineering, being able to create cellular based matter, is a really big research area in the UK at the moment. A long term dream is to be able to reproduce organs. In the short term, it’s about producing tissue from some part of the body – the skin, heart or intestinal tissue for example - for researchers to understand how tissues work and create controlled samples that can be used to test drugs or nutritional products and avoid animal testing.
Within our lab we nearly have the whole range of 3D printing but our focus for the future is on inkjet printing, which is like using a home printer, but instead of printing just one image, you print lots of images on top of each other with a special type of ink. Basically, if you can eject material from a small orifice, you can effectively 3D print because you can choose where to put a small drop and then put many drops on top of each other or next to each other. Cells and other biological materials can be printed and we’re doing a bit of that. There is a whole range of materials – if you can get it to come out of your inkjet heads then you can print it.
It can be liquid form through to solid?
The kind of printers that you see on the TV, printing a box for example, they are solid and then they effectively heat the polymer up and it becomes a liquid. Others are powder bed, where you fuse together the powder particles into the 2D shape that you want and then you put another 2D shape on top and so on. Metals printing also work like that, so you have metal powder which you melt and fuse together.
In layman terms, it is like stacking lots of different plates of glass? Although it would be a solid 3D shape, you’d need to actually stick the layers together...
That’s a good analogy. You’re melting layers together as well as into a layer and with the inkjet printing, when you’re putting the droplets down, they are liquid and so they coalesce with their neighbouring drops - everything comes together as a solid block in 3D.
Do you think these techniques will replace the majority of manufacturing machines that are used across industries?
Not at all. It’s a technique. For example, there are advantages to printing a pill with 3D printing. You can put in and distribute multiple drugs in the way that you want within the pill so that they release in exactly the way that’s needed - you could personalise that to a person’s medical requirements. However, you wouldn’t want to use 3D printing to create Ibuprofen tablets because there’s already an efficient way of doing that, with tablet pressing. If you need a complex shape, personalised or bespoke for the job at hand, then 3D printing is the technique of choice. It will enable us to make things that are not possible to make any other way, but it’s not going to replace traditional super-efficient mass production techniques.
Your research is about its applications in healthcare. You mentioned drugs and tissue sampling - could it also be used for medical instruments in hospitals and battlefields?
In principle. That is something that is being explored already - it has the advantage that you can create a tool and an antibacterial coating at the same time. At the moment you would have to create the tool and then dip coat it. 3D printing is already used in hospitals to fabricate shapes for facial reconstructions and other techniques, as well as in dentistry. In terms of for the battlefield, there’s lots of interest from defence companies. With a 3D printer near a battlefield you could replace a component on an aircraft there and then.
It seems the possibilities are endless. Do you think it opens up the possibility of fraud or homemade weaponry?
Any technology is open to illegal use. Anyone with a lathe can produce a firearm and the same goes with 3D printing, so there isn’t really a moral dilemma there. A lot of 3D printing does allow you a freedom to design and manufacture. The engineering of products is possible but you do need a certain level of technical ability to achieve that. I think the negatives are hyped up and the firearm issue is something that worries people but you’ll probably cause more damage to yourself than others. I see the benefits of 3D printing far outweighing the negatives.
On a positive note, what are the benefits?
It’s a fabulous area to work in because the kind of stuff you can make is really cool. You are, in many ways, only limited by your imagination. Most of the design from manufactures is based around traditional manufacturing so we try to change the mindset of designers, so they open up and are released from the constraints that people are working with at the moment. If we can do that, then people will start to be much more imaginative with what can happen with 3D printing.
Professor Wildman will be taking part in a free workshop organised by Next Business Generation titled The Opportunities of Smart Materials & 3D Printing to Transform Healthcare. It takes place on Wednesday 2 July from 1 - 4pm at The Pavillion.
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