MIT engineers have developed a new desktop 3-D printer that performs up to 10 times faster than existing commercial counterparts. Whereas the most common printers may fabricate a few Lego-sized bricks in one hour, the new design can print similarly sized objects in just a few minutes. The key to the team’s nimble design lies in the printer’s compact printhead, which incorporates two new, speed-enhancing components: a screw mechanism that feeds polymer material through a nozzle at high force; and a laser, built into the printhead, that rapidly heats and melts the material, enabling it to flow faster through the nozzle. The team demonstrated its new design by printing various detailed, handheld 3-D objects, including small eyeglasses frames, a bevel gear, and a miniature replica of the MIT dome — each, from start to finish, within several minutes. “If I can get a prototype part, maybe a bracket or a gear, in five to 10 minutes rather than an hour, or a bigger part over my lunch break rather than the next day, I can engineer, build, and test faster,” says Hart, who is also director of MIT’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and the Mechanosynthesis Group. “If I’m a repair technician and I could have a fast 3-D printer in my vehicle, I could 3-D-print a repair part on-demand after I figure out what’s broken. I don’t have to go to a warehouse and take it out of inventory.”...

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have demonstrated a novel ‘under-extrusion’ method of 3D printing textile products. ...

In the mid-15th century, a new technology that would change the course of history was invented. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, with its movable type, promoted the dissemination of information and ideas that is widely recognized as a major contributing factor for the Renaissance. Over 500 years later, a new type of printing was invented in the labs of MIT. Emanuel Sachs, professor of mechanical engineering, invented a process known as binder jet printing. In binder jet printing, an inkjet printhead selectively drops a liquid binder material into a powder bed — creating a three-dimensional object layer by layer. Sachs coined a new name for this process: 3-D printing. “My father was a publisher and my mother was an editor,” explains Sachs. “Growing up, my father would take me to the printing presses where his books were made, which influenced my decision to name the process 3-D printing.” Sachs’ binder jet printing process was one of several technologies developed in the 1980s and '90s in the field now known as additive manufacturing, a term that has come to describe a wide variety of layer-based production technologies. Over the past three decades, there has been an explosion in additive manufacturing research. These technologies have the potential to transform the way countless products are designed and manufactured. One of the most immediate applications of 3-D printing has been the rapid prototyping of products. “It takes a long time to prototype using traditional manufacturing methods,” explains Sachs. 3-D printing has transformed this process, enabling rapid iteration and testing during the product development process....

Imagine a world in which objects could be fabricated in minutes and customized to the task at hand. An inventor with an idea for a new product could develop a prototype for testing while on a coffee break. A company could mass-produce parts and products, even complex ones, without being tied down to part-specific tooling and machines that can’t be moved. A surgeon could get a bespoke replacement knee for a patient without leaving the operating theater. And a repair person could identify a faulty part and fabricate a new one on site — no need to go to a warehouse to get something out of inventory. Such a future could be made possible by 3-D printing, says A. John Hart, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and the Mechanosynthesis Group at MIT. A common method of 3-D printing, extrusion, starts with a polymer rod, or filament. The filament is heated, melted, and forced through a nozzle in a printhead. The printhead moves across a horizontal surface (the print bed) in a prescribed pattern, depositing one layer of polymer at a time. On each pass over the print bed, instructions tell the printhead exactly where material should and shouldn’t be extruded so that, in the end, the layers stack up to form the desired, freestanding 3-D object....

The paper, which was published as part of MIT’s Work of the Future project, urges the introduction of incentivized employee upskilling programs to help SMEs adopt AM technologies. Without significant investment in training, the team has warned that 3D printing will not be able to reach its full potential or continue to expand into new applications. “Despite its strong industrial potential, the implementation of AM remains constrained by the technology’s maturity and the skills of the corresponding workforce,” said the team in their research. “Upskilling programs can serve the dual purposes of advancing the industrial use of AM, while retaining experienced manufacturing workers.” The Work of the Future project was set up by MIT, and backed by Google and JP Morgan in 2018, to harness recent technological advances for societal benefit. Within the program, MIT’s Haden Quinlan and John Hart were tasked with investigating how the AM workforce has coped with the industry’s progress. In their paper, the team recognized that 3D printing has moved from a focus on prototyping into on-demand production, but also identified a skills shortage that’s slowing its advances. For the researchers, AM has reached an inflection point, at which new training courses and funding are needed, or the technology’s growth risks stalling....

A paper released by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Work of the Future department encourages industrial training in additive manufacturing. Major American news sources have picked up the story, which bodes well for the AM industry. The policy paper reviews AM technology and its future impacts on the workforce and the product lifecycle. These recommendations focus on initiatives that can be implemented in individual companies and by governments to foster market uptake of AM technologies. These recommendations, moreover, take on social significance because they ask businesses to retrain workforces for the coming AM age. Industry 4.0 is rapidly cresting the horizon, and many unions and employees remember tough times when automation displaced part of the workforce. A similar phenomenon may occur as AM becomes mainstream, and the report points to some similar move: Despite a growing body of professional training initiatives for AM, there is evidence that such initiatives may be insufficient to address the shortage of qualified professionals. A 2018 study cosponsored by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute concluded that there may be a total of 2.4 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the United States between 2018 and 2035 and that the great majority of manufacturing executives (89 percent) perceive a talent shortage in U.S. manufacturing....

Measuring only 1 centimeter in volume, the pump was fabricated in 75 minutes in a single process using multiple materials that cost less than $3.89 per unit. It can move both liquids and gases using less power and experiencing less clogging than standard manufactured pumps of this size. One of the pump designs is the first demonstration of a magnetic, multi-material pump 3D printed monolithically — all in one piece. Luis Fernando Velasquez-Garcia, principal research scientist at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), led the team that built the pump. He says the efficient and portable pump could be used in applications “from fuel cells to power generation to heat exchangers” that cool computer chips. Additive manufacturing offers a way to craft miniaturized devices that contain multiple materials with new capabilities, and that are designed on demand for more personalized applications, he suggests. Velasquez-Garcia hopes that the proof-of-principle pump will inspire others to look more closely at the potential of layer-by-layer, computer-aided additive manufacturing, compared to the “cleanroom” mass-production style set by the semiconductor industry....

A method for printing 3D objects that can control living organisms in predictable ways has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere. The technique may lead to 3D printing of biomedical tools, such as customized braces, that incorporate living cells to produce therapeutic compunds such as painkillers or topical treatments, the researchers say. The new development was led by MIT Media Lab Associate Professor Neri Oxman and graduate students Rachel Soo Hoo Smith, Christoph Bader, and Sunanda Sharma, along with six others at MIT and at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The system is described in a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. “We call them hybrid living materials, or HLMs,” Smith says. For their initial proof-of-concept experiments, the team precisely incorporated various chemicals into the 3D printing process. These chemicals act as signals to activate certain responses in biologically engineered microbes, which are spray-coated onto the printed object. Once added, the microbes display specific colors or fluorescence in response to the chemical signals....