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3D Printing Electronic, Optical, and Biological Interconnect Devices

Richard Hague, a professor at the UK's University of Nottingham and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Additive Manufacturing, discusses the direction and current developments in additive manufacturing and 3D printing and how the research center is leading the way on many of these developments. One current project involves 3D printing molded interconnect devices with integrated electronic circuits. A promising technique is reactive jetting, whereby instead of depositing polymers in the form of a solution, the monomer and a catalyst are deposited separately to induce the polymerization in situ, usually post-deposition.

Topics:
Electronic Components Electronics & Computers Implants & Prosthetics Manufacturing & Prototyping Materials Medical Metals Optics Photonics Plastics Rapid Prototyping & Tooling Semiconductors & ICs

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 [Music] I've been lucky enough to be working in the adif area since the start so really since I saw it the Technologies first in 1992 uh which is a long time ago so long way before they were being used for manufacturing um and I used to work in the oil and gas industry which was a very uh lowtech industry in many respects uh and I happened to go to a

    00:00:33 conference and I saw something called a stereo lithography machine and it's uh it was just like watching magic and it was like watching these I guess it's what people see in the news now U but I I was lucky enough to see this 20 years ago most people have been working on single material processes single material polymer systems or single material metal systems problem with the

    00:00:53 single material systems is they can make clever shapes um which are virtually impossible to make by conventional means but they don't do very much it's passive what we're working on is the move to multifunctionality more active additive manufacturing so we're moving towards printing in this first phase of our of our epsrc grant we're looking to print in electronic interconnects or Optical

    00:01:17 interconnects or potentially biological interconnects what's to stop us eventually you going into um your your hearing aid shop and you they doing the scan of your ear canal there and then um and then printing out a custom hearing a for you in the shop with the electronics included most most of the the 3D printing that you see in the press and today is basically based on these

    00:01:39 Extrusion based Technologies but that isn't the reality of additive manufacturing there the reality of most additive manufacturing are powder based Technologies where you'll lay down a layer of powder and you'll fuse them together uh with a laser and those have become the predominant manufacturing techniques and those are the techniques that give you the most design freedoms

    00:01:56 they give you the best mechanical properties and the most industrially relevant today but they can only produce Parts in single materials our research activity that's been done under the epsrc funding um is predominantly jetting based in the past 10 years we've driven the powder based Tech Technologies and been working on those and and lo and behold they've become the

    00:02:14 manufacturing things of CH it's not just because we've been working on them but just because those are the ones to work on we think within our group that the jetting based technologies will be the future Technologies because they give the most potential for printing in functionality as you're going and those are for polymeric Parts um metallic loaded inks but also uh direct metal

    00:02:36 printing as well so some very uh exciting technology that's going to enable us to uh print metal directly you know the stock prices of 3D printing companies are enormous at the moment and they're clearly in a bubble all right the value of those companies you know is is is extraordinary um and I think there will be a correction I think there will be a bit more reality coming in and it's

    00:02:56 it's up to groups like ours to to tell the truth and tell the reality and and and and and to say no you can't make everything the main problem with addi if is the material and and because you're effectively producing the material at the point of cure or fuse or deposition so you're not just creating the topology by Machining away a block of something or forming a material into a mold you're

    00:03:17 actually creating the material at the point of manufacturing as well as the topology and it's that combination that's very important I've never ever regretted once giving up a fairly well paid Oil Company job to come do a PhD in this field and I didn't know which way I was going to go and I certainly didn't think I'd be an academic in this field I thought i' just then go back into

    00:03:37 industry I feel exceptionally privileged actually to be working at the Forefront of this I think it's a great area that is catching imagination you know and is I think it's one of the technologies that is going to be um exciting for a younger generation of people getting involved in manufacturing I genuinely believe these technologies will bring back Manufacturing to our country and

    00:04:01 high wage other high wage economies around the world [Music]