3D Printing: The Revolution in Personalized Manufacturing
INTRODUCTION WASPS DO IT The rhythmic buzzing and continuous oozing of a 3D three dimensional printer can draw a crowd Hypnotized everyone watches as the printer deposits small bits of material layer upon layer on a platform until slowly a new object emerges Ready to use 3D printing may sound like science fiction There’s a reason for that 3D printing has been a star of science fiction in television and film For example the technology appeared in scenes in Star Trek the popular 1960s TV series Later in the 1980s TV show Star Trek The Next Generation the 3D printer was named the Replicator In this series crew members on the Starship Enterprise could order up and print anything they wanted Viewers wished they had their own Replicators to make pizza and banana splits In the twenty-first century MakerBot even named its popular 3D printer Replicator We humans began actually experimenting with 3D printing in the 1980s This style of printing is also known as additive manufacturing because it adds materials layer upon layer to create a 3D object But humans were not the first to develop 3D printing Wasps were additive manufacturers long before us The method paper wasps use to build their homes reveals the basics of 3D printing
HUMAN WASP ENGINEERS Wasps live in nests in communities called colonies A queen wasp starts a colony by building a nest She uses her mandibles appendages near the mouth to scrape wood pulp from trees fence posts and even cardboard into her mouth Mixed with her saliva these materials become a watery pulp The queen finds a good location for building the nest She spits out the pulp layer by layer to create hexagonal six-sided cells in which her young will develop As the number of wasps in the colony grows the new generations of worker wasps construct new cells the same way the queen did In 2012 an engineering team in Italy known as the World’s Advanced Saving Project WASP closely watched wasps specifically the mud dauber wasp at work The human WASP team decided to build 3D printers to mimic the wasps technique The WASP engineers collect large chunks of clay sand plant and other soil materials and put them into a custom-made 20-foot-tall 6-meter 3D printer to print a house layer by layer The house cost almost nothing to print because the nontraditional building materials are gathered at the site The team creates these homes at locations where typical building materials bricks stones and wood are inaccessible or too costly to use for homes and other buildings Wasps build the hexagonal cells of their colonies in layers Inspired by this natural technology human entrepreneurs have modeled 3D printing techniques to build houses and other structures layer by layer WASPSDOIT 5
3D printing can change not only where people live but how they live For example high school students in Van Buren Ohio used a 3D printer to create a prosthetic hand for a toddler in their town The students gathered thirty dollars worth of plastic melted it into liquid form and put it into the school’s 3D printer They used 3D computer-aided design CAD software to design the hand Thomas Wolford a senior at Van Buren High School described the printing process The nozzle goes around it all in crazy funky patterns and prints it out layer by layer he said Another senior Aaron Scasny added We ran fishing wire down through the bottom of the hand and this elastic threaded cord through the top so when you bend it it acts like tendons in your hand Because young children outgrow their prosthetics outfitting them with artificial limbs was expensive in the past But 3D printing has made it Teens in Ohio 3D printed a prosthetic hand for Addy Johnson at their school The technologies involved in 3D printing are available to all and are often used to improve everyday life for individuals possible for more children and adults to have the prosthetics they need because they can afford it BIOPRINTERS In the medical field 3D printing is a modern superpower With bioprinters bioprinting researchers from all over the world have successfully re-created human ears noses skull bones tracheas bladders and other body parts The ink-jet printing of viable cells is one example of what a 3D printer can do It deposits drops of 6 3D P R IN T IN G
This 3D printer can quickly produce human tissues The bioprint head moves back and forth and up and down placing human cells on the platform The bioprinter alternates layers of bioink a dissolvable gel with the cells to protect them during printing It also places growth factor a protein or a hormone in the solution to help cells grow The final tissue takes several hours to print human cellular material and proteins onto a platform in the same way an ink-jet printer drops ink onto a piece of paper Traditional printers place one layer of ink onto one sheet of paper at a time By contrast a 3D ink-jet printer adjusts its platform up and down adding cellular material layer by layer until a 3D organ emerges In the future 3D medical printouts could be lifesaving for people who need organ transplants or repairs due to injuries or illness However Robert Langer a professor of chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT cautions about the current limitations of 3D bioprinting Right now we can’t make any organ or tissue to function properly in humans other than skin 3D printing hasn’t even been used successfully for that Making an organ also requires blood vessels nerves and cells to behave properly 3D printing can’t do that Bioprinting researchers worldwide continue their laboratory work researching designing and 3D printing to find lifesaving solutions Wasps have had millions of years to evolve their 3D printing process For humans 3D printing technologies are a revolution WASPSDOIT 7
