Medical Design Briefs - May 2024 - 22

rates of up to 1 million particles per day. If
this sounds like a familiar form for manufacturing,
that's intentional.
" You don't buy stuff you can't make, "
says DeSimone, who is also professor of
chemical engineering in the School of Engineering.
" The tools that most researchers
use are tools for making prototypes and
test beds, and to prove important points.
My lab does translational manufacturing
science - we develop tools that enable
scale. This is one of the great examples of
what that focus has meant for us. "
There are trade-offs in 3D printing of
resolution versus speed. For instance, other
3D printing processes can print much
smaller - on the nanometer scale - but
are slower. And, of course, macroscopic 3D
printing has already gained a foothold (literally)
in mass manufacturing, in the form
of shoes, household goods, machine parts,
football helmets, dentures, hearing aids,
and more. This work addresses opportunities
in between those worlds.
" We're navigating a precise balance between
speed and resolution, " says Kronenfeld.
" Our approach is distinctively capable
of producing high-resolution outputs
while preserving the fabrication pace required
to meet the particle production
volumes that experts consider essential
for various applications. Techniques with
potential for translational impact must be
n Hard and Soft
The researchers hope that the r2rCLIP
process sees wide adoption by other
researchers and industry. Beyond
that, DeSimone believes that 3D printing
as a field is quickly evolving past questions
about the process and toward ambitions
about the possibilities.
" r2rCLIP is a foundational technology, "
says DeSimone. " But I do believe that we're
now entering a world focused on 3D products
themselves more so than the process.
These processes are becoming clearly valuable
and useful. And now the question is:
What are the high-value applications? "
For their part, the researchers have already
experimented with
producing
both hard and soft particles, made of ceramics
and of hydrogels. The first could
see applications in microelectronics
manufacturing and the latter in drug delivery
in the body.
" There's a wide array of applications,
and we're just beginning to explore them, "
says Maria Dulay, senior research scientist
in the DeSimone lab and co-author of the
paper. " It's quite extraordinary, where
we're at with this technique. "
Additional co-authors are Lukas Rother,
who was a visiting master's student at the
feasibly adaptable from the research lab
scale to that of industrial production. "
time of this work, and Max Saccone, a postdoctoral
scholar in chemical engineering
and radiology. DeSimone is also a professor,
by courtesy, in chemistry in the School
of Humanities and Sciences, materials science
and engineering in the School of Engineering,
and operations, information,
and technology in the Graduate School of
Business. He is a member of Stanford
Bio-X, the Wu Tsai Human Performance
Alliance, and the Stanford Cancer Institute,
and a faculty fellow of Sarafan
ChEM-H, co-director of the Canary Center
at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection and
founding faculty director of the Center for
STEMM Mentorship at Stanford.
This research was funded in part by
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and the National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Part of this work was performed
at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities,
supported by the National Science
Foundation.
This article was written by Taylor Kuboa,
Stanford University. For more information,
contact Jason Kronenfeld, jkronen@
stanford.edu or visit www.stanford.edu.
Read the full
scientific paper.
3D Printing Method Builds Structures with Two Metals
The bimetallic material
proved to be stronger
than either metal alone.
Washington State University
Pullman, WA
Taking a cue from the structural complexity
of trees and bones, Washington
State University engineers have created a
way to 3D print two types of steel in the
same circular layer using two welding machines.
The resulting bimetallic material
proved 33-42 percent stronger than either
metal alone, thanks in part to pressure
caused between the metals as they
cool together.
The new method uses commonplace,
relatively inexpensive tools, so manufacturers
and repair shops could use it in
the near term. With further develop22
ment,
it could potentially be used to
make high-performance medical implants
or even parts for space travel, says
Amit Bandyopadhyay, senior author of
the study published in the journal Nature
Communications.
" It has very broad applications because
any place that is doing any kind of
welding can now expand their design
concepts or find applications where they
can combine a very hard material and a
soft material almost simultaneously, " says
Bandyopadhyay, a professor in WSU's
School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.
The
research team borrowed the idea
from nature, noting that trees and bones
get their strength from the way layered
rings of different materials interact with
each other. To mimic this with metals,
the WSU researchers used welding
equipment commonly found in automowww.medicaldesignbriefs.com
Part
of the new hybrid setup developed by WSU researchers
that creates parts using precise computer
programming and two welding heads. It uses commonplace,
relatively inexpensive tools, so manufacturers and
repair shops could potentially use this method in the
near future. (Credit: Washington State University)
Medical Design Briefs, May 2024
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Medical Design Briefs - May 2024

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