-This is an info page explaining the capability of this technology, and why it forms the central theme for my work.
- I also discuss how the lack of "open-access" and ready-to-use hardware & materials has impeded R&D and faster adoption. It was a major limitation that I learned to circumvent, working on a minimal budget.
Please reach out to learn about some of my workarounds to get started on this technology, on a shoestring budget.
Many 3D-printing technologies are inherently limited to single-material systems (like resin / vat based printing)
Even the multi-material printers using extrusion based approaches cannot achieve the level of material mixing and customization that inkjet offers without additional steps
Desktop inkjet printers are ubiquitous tools in homes and offices. When combined with Reactive Chemistry and a third axis to move vertically, the same technology can be easily turned into a 3D-printer.
Instead of CMYK colored inks, we will be printing many tiny droplets UV-reactive and Thermally-reactive materials that react at the deposition-site to solidify, and have a wide range of mechanical, electronic and chemical properties.
What truly sets this technology apart, is the ability to rapidly combine many different materials simultaneously to achieve properties that are not found in the constituent starting materials. Just like how we print very colorful photographs using only CMYK colored inks, we can do the same with materials and their properties. The level of customization is endless. It can also co-deposit and mix materials that are IMPOSSIBLE to combine using other methods - such as oil and water-based polymers which would otherwise phase-separate if we try to combine them in any other way! It also allows printing of liquids inside of solids in the same process, to form enclosed hydraulic actuating structures.
Inkjet-printed Fluorescent Hydrogels under UV-light
Shows In-Situ Mixing both in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous ways. Does not require any additional hardware, mixing steps, additional print-passes or purge-sequences.
Incorporating multi-functional capabilities into mechanical structures is very advantageous for applications across robotics, electronics, biomedical devices and patient-specific sensing platforms.
Further, it allows us to simultaneously fabricate many versions / iterations of the same device with varying material ratios in the same process. Such rapid-prototyping capability, combined with automation, will be one of the most useful design and prototyping tools for future engineers and industries.
This is a highly-scalable technology both in terms of volumetric throughput and number of materials being printed. It is also widely used in industries for various purposes, and is a reliable workhorse-technology.
Inkjet printing struggles from a bottleneck that is solvable, but few have been willing to address specifically:
Inkjet printheads have tight requirements of a low material viscosity and surface tension. The raw materials further need to be reactive under a stimulus to convert into an engineering material. This formulation discovery process and testing requires dedicated resources and collaborative efforts between hardware designers and chemists.
Inkjet 3D-printer manufacturers lock their software to only accept their own brand materials -- which lack many properties for advanced applications. These systems are also extremely expensive to purchase and maintain, which is another limiting factor for research labs and startups. The lack of back-end access to tune the printing sequences and materials handling and inability to try custom formulations is an impediment for faster progress and adoption
To gain traction for wide adoption as a prototyping tool in research labs and industries, we need open-access multi-material hardware that allows us to use our own material formulations of aqueous, non-aqueous, solvent-based and conductive materials in the same system. This does not exist commercially either.
I managed to get around this issue by using a low-cost DTG flatbed printer with 3 axis motion (it is commonly used for printing pictures on tshirts, braille signboards etc!). The print-carriage is straight out of an Epson photoprinter. Despite the viscosity limitation, I still have 8 material channels with 192 nozzles per channel, and a UV-curing light with a heated bed. I formulate my own materials and load them into the system. It is not perfect, but has been an amazing starting point to get moving and prove my concepts. In the process of developing the fabrication and customized formulations of many types from scratch, I have gained a lot of experimental-chemistry and polymers expertise. My materials are also readily compatible with almost all brands of commercial piezo-driven inkjet printheads.
I am also contributing to an exciting project to build a highly advanced 3D-printing system from-scratch, which will soon democratize access to multi-material inkjet 3D printing. Reach out for more details
Despite the difficulty, it has been a very rewarding journey. I have hit many useful milestones along the way which are industrially and commercially relevant. Check out more on this site to learn about the materials I have developed