Gold Particle 'Shine' Helps Find Defects in 3D Printing
This innovative technique allows gold to actually ‘shine’ inside 3D printed parts to highlight any problem. Vanderbilt University researchers used tiny particles of the precious metal, which actually show up as a deep maroon color. The nanoparticles are about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair, but they could solve a major problem in manufacturing. The process involves mixing the gold nanoparticles with a dissolved plastic polymer, dispersing it throughout the medium. When it hardens, the plastic is pressed into gold nanoparticle-filled polymer tubing, which can then be used in standard 3D printers. After a part is printed, it goes into a special UV-Vis spectrophotometer to inspect for defects.
Transcript
00:00:00 They found gold in the hills! It's been desired through the ages and the precious metal endures, even in a Vanderbilt research lab. It's not the gold color that you're going to think of when we get down to the nano scale. This is their gold, gold trichloride. Made into super small nano-particles 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. Researchers say these small gold pieces can light up problems in 3-D printing. In the processing of 3D printing materials there can be defects, such as missing print layers. These defects can compromise the structural integrity of the 3D printed products.
00:00:43 So Vanderbilt researchers decided to put gold inside the printing material. We start with the gold nano-particle synthesis. It's a detailed process from mixing and melting the gold with standard plastic polymer, to shredding it after it hardens. And making the gold infused polymer filament. It then goes into a standard 3D printer to make the needed part. The final step is here a special scanner which looks inside the part. It's very quick it takes just a matter of seconds and by doing a scan across the surface of the part we're able to inspect and detect defects that aren't visible to the naked eye using just the optical properties of the embedded nano-particles.
00:01:32 There's a lot of future here that there's tremendous possibilities for what we can do with this technology. The thing that really gets me excited is just the broad range of things that we can go ahead and use this for we've kind of just scratched the surface. For these Vanderbilt researchers the gold rush continues.