Hello everybody. Thanks for having me today. I’m a little bit injured, but it takes more than a car to stop me from talking to you. Maybe a tank.
Today I want to talk about the micro-printer, about my work, how everything started, and what was my motivation behind to build the smallest 3D printer in the world. Let’s start with my daily business. My normal working field is called two photon polymerization. It sounds very nerdy. It is very nerdy.
Well, what do you need for making this stuff? You need a complex laser system, the so called femotsecond laser system, which you focus onto a very tiny spot, very, very, very tiny. This is a very expensive, not very durable laser system. On the other hand, you need a very complex positioning system. We call it Agathe, because it’s very heavy and so Agathe is a nice name. Well, you need this system to move the laser through the sample at a very accurate level at about 200 nanometers, so very accurate.
What can you do with that? Well, you can do things that you cannot see with your eyes. So you can print out whatever you want. You can print out the tower bridge. You can print out Agathe’s husband. But what makes it so mind- blowing? You maybe noticed this scale bar, and it’s 100 microns for the tower bridge and 20 microns for the fat man. For comparison, the diameter of a human here is around 50 microns. So, these objects are like a dust particle or even smaller. You can hardly see it. What you can also do is and what we are also working on is improving the system, improving the resonance, the material we use for catching a worm or something else inside the resin. We move the laser through the resin. If it’s polymerized, we catch up a living animal, here a special worm, and what we are trying to do or what the next step would be to make biocompatible polymers and maybe to write some things inside your body or inside the body of a worm or to attach cells to our structures and so on.
That’s my normal working field. Today I want to tell the story behind the micro-printer, what was my motivation. Everything started at Monday morning, 6:30. Okay, that’s a lie. Maybe it was 10 o’clock. When I went to my laser lab, which is located near Karlsplatz in [inaudible 4:01] House of the Vienna University of Technology, and I went in and saw that this laser system was broken and I tried to fix that. It took me half a day. It took me several hours, and then I noticed, okay, there is a major issue with the pump service. I cannot fix that myself, so we have to call the service technician.
From that point on, I noticed I had time to think. So, I thought what to do now. Maybe start to write my PhD thesis. No, not a good idea at all. So I started thinking maybe write a scientific paper. Not a good idea at all. Then, on Saturday, after a week of thinking, I came up with the idea to build the smallest 3D micro-printer in the world, or the smallest 3D printer in the world.
So, I called my professor and I told him about it. “Let’s build this thing and I have time. Is it okay?” “Go ahead, build it.” So I went to the University, and from that point on, I just put everything out of my brain inside the computer to make this CAD construction of the whole stuff. After a few months, we had the first test run with the system, and it works brilliant from the first test on. It had the same resolution as systems which cost 60,000 Euros, and we only spent 1,500 Euros for the system, not including my salary. But that wouldn’t add so much on it.
How does this work? I’ve brought a video where you can see how you can put in your three dimensional file. This video has been produced by a friend of mine, Junior Veloso. You can see you have a set stage which moves up, and under the set stage, there is a liquid, which gets solidified by the light. Slice by slice you create the model. You really pull it out of the liquid. It just depends on how big is your model. So maybe you have 100 slices, 1,000 or 10,000 slices. So, that’s how it works. Of course, this is a much bigger machine than the micro-printer, but it uses more or less the same principle. So that’s what I want to show you. At the end, this head, this alien head is attached to the building platform. When the process is done, you just simply have to break the head from the support structure you need and then everything’s ready.
What does the micro-printer look like? Well, maybe some of you have already seen this picture. I also brought it to you in person. So I want to kindly introduce you to the 3D micro-printer, which looks like this. It’s very small, so it’s really a desktop version. It’s really an affordable system. We are really proud of it, actually.
You have this tiny little system. There are bigger ones. What can you do with that, with a cheap, affordable system? For example, you all know these hearing aids. They have to be produced individually for each person. So this is a perfect example for using this technology to create the shell for a hearing aid. Normally, you go to the store, they scan your ear, they send the data to Germany via email, and then they print it out with . . . thank you. Then they print it out with a big machine. Then when it’s ready, they send it back to Vienna or wherever you are via post, and then they put in the electronic.
When you have a micro-printer in your store, you can go to the store, they scan your ear, they just press print, the 3D model gets sliced. You can go for coffee, you can go to the University, whatever you want, and instead of five days, you can have your ear shell or your hearing aid in one day, in just one day. That is an example of how these tiny little machines or other cheap 3D printers could change our everyday life.
Thank you very much, and yeah, start printing whatever you want, whatever you need.
