3D Printing Extremely Viscous Materials Using Ultrasonic Vibrations

Watch this video to see how extremely viscous (μ >1000 Pa·s) plastic solids can be 3D-printed using a relatively simple and low-cost nozzle vibration approach that can enable the widespread fabrication of electronics, biomedical devices, pharmaceuticals and food using viscous heterogeneous material precursors in residential, educational, and industrial settings.

Transcript

00:00:00 I'm Professor Monique McClain, and I'm  an assistant professor in Mechanical   Engineering here at Purdue. And I work on  3D printing energetic materials. Energetic   materials include propellants, pyrotechnics, and  explosives. But anything that really gives off a   lot of energy at a really fast rate. Energetic  materials are really important to understand,   because if you don't handle them properly, don't  store them properly, don't make them properly,   they can go off and be really dangerous,  or they won't perform as expected. So it's   really important to understand how we build  them, understand how they'll perform in their   final application. Now 3D printing energetic  materials is a new area of research. You want   to make really complicated shapes, right? So  we're trying to look at 3D printing them and   understanding how 3D printing affects their  final structure, their final properties, their  

00:00:43 final combustion performance, for example. And  those are unknown at this point, and we're trying   to figure that out at the McClain team. Zucrow  Laboratories is a very unique set of facilities   where the McClain team is currently located. So  at Zucrow you can test live energetic materials,   like propellants and whatnot. So you can burn  them directly here. So we can take our 3D printed   samples and just directly test them to understand  their properties better. So we tend to do a lot of   experimental work here in the McClain team. So we  have everyone from people who are interested in,   you know, burning things to do mechanical  testing, and we have people interested in   developing new manufacturing techniques and  exploring material science properties. So we   really need anyone within that spectrum to help us  understand these problems. The McClain team works   on very interdisciplinary problems related to 3D  printed energetic materials. So it doesn't really  

00:01:31 matter if you are just interested in energetics,  and then you want to learn more about 3D printing,   or if you come from the 3D printing world and want  to learn more about energetics. But in general,   we need you to come here and help us  solve these very complicated problems.