A team of Harvard materials scientists led by Professor Jennifer Lewis has 3D printed lithium-ion microbatteries smaller than a grain of sand. The battery materials themselves are not new. Lewis says her group holds eight patents and has licensed and commercialized its technology for an electronics 3D printer.
Lewis is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, and her new company, Voxel8, recently secured funding from Braemar Energy Ventures.
Voxel8 is launching the electronics 3D printer this week at CES 2015 and it’s a game-changing machine.
The Voxel8 Developer’s Kit is available for pre-order now at the company’s website, and at $8,999, the kit includes the new printer, four PLA filament spools, ten conductive ink cartridges and an additional print bed.
“Voxel8 is leveraging over a decade of research which has led to 17 patents on functional materials, printheads, and other processes for 3D printing,” says Lewis. “Our work provides the foundation for Voxel8’s effort to revolutionize multi-material 3D printing. To realize our vision, we’ve recruited a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in advanced materials, precision hardware, intelligent software and design.”
The printer works like this: when a circuit is placed into an object, a second nozzle comes into play which is filled with the highly conductive silver ink. It’s five-thousand times more conductive than the conductive pastes and filaments currently on the market, and then, as the circuit printing is complete, the printer outputs thermoplastics through another nozzle to finish the object.
If a chip or additional electronic component – like a sensor or LED – is needed, the printer stops printing, allowing a user to remove the build tray. The component can be located within the object, the build tray can be replaced and the print job resumes.
The Voxel8 is made to let users design and fabricate devices which include 3D printed electromagnetic coils, antennas and a wide variety of other control mechanisms.
The Voxel8 has a 10 x 15 x 10 cm printing area. It combines FFF with Pneumatic Direct Write and prints at a layer resolution of 200 microns. It uses 1.75 mm filament and can print conductive traces 250 microns wide. Supported file formats include AMF, STL, PLY, OBJ and OFF.
Resistivity of printed channels checks in at 5.00 × 10-7 Ω-m with a proprietary silver ink which cures in just five minutes.
And if that’s not enough, Voxel8 say they’ve partnered with Autodesk to create a new Spark-powered design tool they call Project Wire. It will let designers easily develop electronics by guiding the placement of free-form wiring and components and then slicing multiple materials to locate thermoplastics and inks.
“We’re excited to work with companies like Voxel8, because they are really pushing the boundaries of what 3D printing is capable of, and by incorporating conductive inks directly into the 3D printing process, we can start to create things that have function after they are printed,” says Jeff Kowalski, the CTO of Autodesk.
References
- Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (wyss.harvard.edu)
- Voxel8 (voxel8.co)