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3D printings of micron-sized objects in minutes
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01-09-2012 1:02am#1Thanks to CerebralCortex who shared this article over on Atheism & Agnosticism's Interesting Stuff Thread.
A little background first:
What do these 3D "printings" look like? Here are a few examples:Printing three dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using “two-photon lithography”. With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have now made a major breakthrough in speeding up this printing technique: The high-precision-3D-printer at TU Vienna is orders of magnitude faster than similar devices (see video). This opens up completely new areas of application, such as in medicine.
A model of St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna:
The London Tower Bridge:
A racecar:
The scale that these objects are printed at is mind-boggling. If you look at the first image, of the Cathedral, you'll see a scale with 50µm beside it. 1µm is equal to one-millionth of a metre. To give you some perspective, the average hair on your head has a diameter of about 100µm, or one ten-thousandth of a metre. So these extremely intricate, detailed 3D printings are at the scale of the width of a hair off of your head, or even smaller.
What's more amazing is the speed at which these objects can be made: they take minutes to print. Not hours, or days, but minutes.
He's a video of the racecar from above being printed in about 4 minutes:
The full article, with lots of information about the process is available here, courtesy of The Vienna Unversity of Technology.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y0j191H0kYAdvertisement