What’s Next for 3D Printing?

While 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is transforming the industrial world, it also has opened up new possibilities in other areas, such as smart materials and bioprinting.

With its seemingly limitless potential, fast-evolving 3D printing/additive manufacturing is changing the way goods and services are designed, manufactured, and consumed. But there are even greater transformations on the horizon. Here are some of the emerging innovations that 3D printing is bringing to different industries and sectors.

Bioprinting

#Bioprinting is the process of using 3D printing to create biological structures, such as tissues, organs, and cells, from #biomaterials, such as cells, proteins, and polymers.Hailed as one of the most exciting trends, bioprinting will become commonplace as the technology matures, carrying with it the power to save lives by offering solutions for organ shortages, disease modeling, drug testing, and tissue engineering, thus revolutionising the fields of #medicine, biotechnology, and #bioengineering. What started as a regenerative medicine tool, 3D bioprinting’s ultimate goal is the production of artificial organs for transplantation.

England’s University of Birmingham is leading development of the technology through the creation of a new 3D bioprinting process that speeds up and simplifies the creation of tissue-compatible artificially engineered organs, making wider adoption more likely. Another medical first involving 3D bioprinting technology is the development of a new method of immunotherapy for treating cancer using natural killer cells (NK cells).

4D printing and smart materials:

#4Dprinting technology uses the 3D printing process to create objects with shape-memory alloys, #hydrogels, or self-healing polymers that can change their shape, properties, or functions over time or in response to external stimuli, such as temperature, light, or moisture. While #3Dprinting creates static structures, 4D printing and smart materials have the potential to create adaptive and responsive products and systems, such as self-assembling structures, wearable devices/soft robotics.

Whilst 3D printing offers an alternative way of producing the same product that might have been created using #CNCmachining or #injectionmolding, 4D printing creates parts that traditional manufacturing methods simply cannot achieve. This is one reason why 4D printing will transform many industries.

Smart medical implants and tissue engineering are two areas being targeted to benefit from the 4D printing approach in medical engineering applications. Software and hardware for a 4D printer with applications in the biomedical industry have also been developed by researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid making it possible to create soft robotics, intelligent sensors, and substrates that send signals to various cellular systems, among other things.

Source:Luke Smoothy/Plasticstoday

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