New breakthrough in the field of 3D printing
According to Xinhua News Agency, breakthroughs in 3D printing technology are crucial for the development of cutting-edge fields such as biomedicine, micro-nano technology, and advanced manufacturing. Chinese scientists have developed a new 3D printing technology that can complete high-resolution 3D printing of complex objects at the millimeter level in just 0.6 seconds, setting a new record for 3D printing speed. This achievement was published online in Nature on the morning of the 12th.
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While 3D printing has wide applications, it has long been plagued by the challenge of “speed and accuracy”: the precise mechanical movement between the printing material and the probe ensures accuracy, but printing efficiency is low. High-resolution printing of millimeter-sized objects often takes tens of minutes or even several hours, making it difficult to meet the needs of scientific research and production. Furthermore, existing high-speed 3D printing also has limitations regarding container structure and material viscosity.
A research team led by Professor Dai Qionghai, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at the Imaging and Intelligent Technology Laboratory of Tsinghua University, based on their extensive experience in computational optics, discovered that computational optics can manipulate high-dimensional holographic light fields to construct 3D entities. After five years of dedicated research, the team overcame a series of challenges, including high-speed control of multi-view light fields and optimization algorithms for holographic patterns to extend depth of field, ultimately creating the “Digital Incoherent Synthetic Holographic Light Field (DISH)” 3D printing technology.
Experiments show that this technology can generate complex structures at the millimeter scale in just 0.6 seconds, with the finest structures reaching 12 micrometers in size, and a printing rate of up to 333 cubic millimeters per second. “This is currently the highest known speed for 3D printing,” said Associate Professor Wu Jiamin, a team member. Thanks to its innovative optical system design, DISH technology breaks through the speed bottleneck of point-by-point or layer-by-layer scanning modes, accurately projecting complex three-dimensional light intensity distributions in an extremely short time, enabling rapid printing of objects.
Another advantage of this technology is its extremely simple requirements for the printing container. The container only needs to have an optical plane, and it must remain stationary during printing, without requiring high-precision relative movement. This greatly expands the printing scenarios, especially enabling the direct placement of printing materials within ordinary fluid pipes, achieving batch and continuous printing in fluid environments.
Dai Qionghai believes that DISH provides new solutions for technological upgrades in related fields. For example, in the field of engineering and manufacturing, it can mass-produce micro-components such as photonic computing devices and mobile phone camera modules, and print parts with sharp angles and complex curved surfaces. In the future, it is expected to expand to complex scenarios such as flexible electronics, micro-robots, and high-resolution tissue models.