CHANNELS

Aerospace

Automotive

Automated & Autonomous Vehicles

Battery & Electrification Technology

Defense

Drone TV

Electronics

Manufacturing & Prototyping

Materials

Medical

Motion Control

RF & Microwave Technology

Robotics & Automation

Sensors & IoT

Test & Measurement

Aerospace
Automotive
Automated & Autonomous Vehicles
Battery & Electrification Technology
Defense
Drone TV
Electronics
Manufacturing & Prototyping
Materials
Medical
Motion Control
RF & Microwave Technology
Robotics & Automation
Sensors & IoT
Test & Measurement
Aerospace & Defense
Search Results

New 3D Printing Method Can Produce Magnetic Parts - Including Heart Pumps

Not only are artificial heart pumps geometrically complex products to 3D print, they also contain magnets. Research on 3D printing with magnets is still in its very early stages. Doctoral student Kai von Petersdorff-Campen from ETH Zurich  has successfully printed one of the first heart pump prototypes with magnetic components manufactured using 3D printing. He calls the new method "embedded magnet printing." The key is to ensure that the magnets are printed directly in the plastic. Magnetic powder and plastic are mixed before printing and processed into strands. These go through the 3D printer, which processes them in a similar way to conventional 3D printing. The printed piece is magnetized in an external field. The potential for 3D printing magnetic components is huge: they are a key component in electric motors, from a computer’s hard drive to loudspeakers and microwaves.

Topics:
Manufacturing & Prototyping Materials Medical Motion Control

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music] rotary blood pumps consist of many parts the housing Inlet and outlet impeller bearing system driving magnets and so on building such pumps with traditional manufacturing methods is very complex so therefore design iterations from concept to a testable prototype take up a lot of time furthermore traditional manufacturing technologies severely

    00:00:30 limit the freedom for complex designs to counteract those drawbacks we asked ourselves is it possible to 3d print an entire pump including the driving and bearing magnets I'm - Peter Sauve and I'm a researcher in the product development of ETH Zurich in Switzerland critical components of a rotary blood pump are the magnets to print them directly into the parts while printing

    00:00:56 the pump itself we developed a process that we call embedded magnet printing we are printing a filament of a magnet powder polymer composite and a conventional fused deposition modeling printer and then magnetized the part in a strong magnetic field using this new process we printed a pump demonstrator in one single print job it has 10 integrated components the housing the

    00:01:21 impeller for magnets for two radial magnetic bearings and for magnets fitted into the blade shape for driving them patter by magnetic coupling to actuate this prototype system we use magnetic coupling with strong permanent magnets spinning on a servo motor this approach will be replaced in the future by stator coils attached to the bottom of the housing this is our very first

    00:01:46 proof of concept prototype in terms of materials printing precision and reliability there still is a lot of work to be done however I think embedded magnet printing has the potential to change the way engineers test and iterate new designs this method allows you to develop more complex and innovative structures that would otherwise not be manufacturable and you

    00:02:07 can test and iterate those designs in a matter of hours rather than weeks [Music] for printing magnets we first had to develop a filament with a high loading of magnetic particles that was processable on a 3d printer this is quite a challenge on the one hand you want to put as much powder in as possible to have strong magnets on the

    00:02:33 other hand you want to put in a decent amount of polymers to make a filament flexible enough to be spooled and stiff enough to be pushed through the printing head we iterated with many polymers and compositions tested for print ability mechanical and magnetic properties and started over again our final composition has a loading of 90 to 8% which corresponds to a very dense packing of

    00:02:55 the magnetic spheres and the polymer in between we reach eminences of 350 mini Tesla's which is well within the range of what you would get for injection molder magnets and roughly 25% of the strongest sintered gnudi Miam iron bar and magnets the printing process is done on the conventional FDM printer with multiple extruders we slice the model and then in each layer the printer

    00:03:25 changes the filaments to print different materials in different areas to support overhangs or to fill gaps we use a water soluble material that will be removed after the print the final step is to magnetize the part in a strong magnetic field this is necessary because the powder that we use is isotropic meaning that there is no overall magnetic polarization to it

    00:04:03 currently we can only have one polarization direction for all magnetic regions in the part [Music] we then put our demonstrator pump to the test at 1,000 deportations per minute we were able to generate a flow of two and a half liters per minute nothing I would want to have implanted but I'm satisfied for it being the first all components

    00:04:30 printed pump early testing of rotary buck pumps is only one possible field of application as magnets are integrated in many biomedical devices there's a big potential to transfer that knowledge to other applications I hope this technology will help designers and engineers to go around the bottleneck of conventional manufacturing methods and generally make development

    00:04:52 processes more agile faster and test-driven