From the course: Additive Manufacturing: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Nanoprinting

From the course: Additive Manufacturing: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

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Nanoprinting

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- [Instructor] As 3D printing technology expands and matures, it's become possible to print in more extreme corners of the manufacturing space. In this movie, we'll explore the realm of the very small, or nano-printing. We'll define that here as printing parts that are less than a millimeter, or features that are the scale of a few microns or smaller. Very finely detailed prints are typically made with liquid resin processes, since the laser spot size can be a lot smaller than a physical nozzle ever could be. Mainstream resin SLA printers are close to this realm. Laser spot sizes are about a hundred microns and layer thicknesses a bit less than that are common, particularly in higher-end machines. This is adequate for many micro-machining and microfluidics applications but going beyond it requires taking another step. Conventional SLA resin printing shines a laser or other light source through a window at the bottom of a tank of resin. This means that the resin hardens right onto the bottom surface of the tank and has to be peeled off. This can limit the feature size that'll survive peeling. Peel time typically dominates print time. - [Instructor] The technique of two-photon polymerization, on the other hand, focuses laser energy onto a spot in liquid resin as shown in this diagram for manufacturer UpNano. In this case, the light passes through the resin and the resin is only sensitive enough to be polymerized where the light focuses to a point. This castle was printed by printer manufacturer UpNano using two-photon polymerization. The castle is 230 by 250 by 360 microns and was printed in less than six minutes. It was printed on the point of a sharpened pencil. Taking a closer look at the castle, the pillars of the spire are 950 nanometers, or about one micron in diameter, yet are strong enough to hold up he top of the structure. The images shown here were taken with an electron microscope. These machines are challenging to use, and it's easy to lose a part. Here we see the castle being created with UpNano's NanoOne printer and being removed from the printer. Finally, it's washed and can be viewed with a microscope. Users have to be careful not to drop their prints. The size of the spot can be changed by using a different focusing objective lens for the print. You can read more about this at Upnano's site, Upnano.at. - [Instructor] Manufacturer Nanoscribe uses a similar approach for their two-photon polymerization printer, the Photonic Professional GT2. Note that the vertical scale bar in this image is just 1.5 millimeters. Microfluidics is a key application for this technology. You can see the scale of this nozzle from the bar on the lower left. Nanoscribe also uses gray-scale lithography to print 2 1/2 dimensional objects. Like parts made by a three-axis CNC milling machine at the micro scale, 2 1/2D prints can have some limited features in the third dimension. These micro optics were created by this process with Nanoscale's Quantum X Grayscale lithography printer. You can read more about Nanoscribe at www.nanoscribe.com. - [Instructor] 3D printing is moving into truly amazing realms of the very small. We can only imagine what will be possible as we begin to fabricate at the nano-scale.

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