Laminate Ink Jet Fabricator
From Wise Nano
Laminate Ink Jetting Fabrication, How Top - Down and Bottom - Up fabrication techniques can meet to form artifacts that are structured from nanometers to meters.
The purpose of this essay is to outline an approach for the creation of computer controlled, general purpose, fabrication systems. The fabrication system can; 1.) handle a wide variety of materials, 2.) be fast enough to make large, complex artifacts in less than a day 3.) use “off the shelf” techniques that can be refined to give greater precision and wider capabilities.
The general process is straight forward, yet flexible. a.) You start with a substrate that has a uniform length and width. b.) The substrate is passed under a series of ink jetting stations which produce a pattern of ink on the substrate. c.) The printed substrate is moved and stacked upon the previously printed layer. d.) The top layer is bonded to the layer underneath. e.) Excess substrate is removed.
This system uses an additive process (layering of the ink jetted patterns) to make the artifact and a subtractive process (the removal of excess substrate) to simplify the handling of each layer.
Material diversity can come from both the substrate and the ink. The substrate could be made from a wide variety of materials; e.g.. metal foil, plastic sheet, paper, woven bucky tube mesh, etc. The inks can range from a simple, single component liquid (DPDGA monomer) to a very complex multi component mixture ( water, long chain functionalized polymer, DNA coated nano-particles) The final artifact could be made of ~ 1-10 different substrates and ~ 5 -100 different inks. (*note* you must make sure that the ink is compatible with the substrate that it is printed on.)
Commercial ink jetting systems run at speeds from ~ 30 - 300 meters per minute. If each layer was 10 cm by 10 cm one printing station would be able to print ~400 thousand to ~4 million layers in a day. If stacking, and bonding the layers together takes 1 second you could stack ~80,thousand layers in a day. Cutting and removing the excess substrate will probably be the rate limiting step. Lets assume that you use a laser to cut away the excess substrate and that it takes 5 seconds to print, stack, bond, and cut a layer you could fabricate an artifact with ~13,000 layers in a day. If each layer was 10 microns thick it would take less than a day to make an artifact that would fill a 10 x 10 x 10 centimeter cube.
Although the thinness of your substrate, the size of ink droplets and the precision of placement of the ink is all measured in the micron range, smaller levels of organization can be obtained from pre-patterning of the substrate, adding nano-structured particles to the ink, and using methods of self-assembly.
The type of system described here could be constructed today, yet this general set up can accommodate a great deal of technological evolution in the substrates and inks. For example, make the substrate out of a 2-D weave of fibers that have a pattern of different chemical groups along their length. Then ink jet out simple particles, complex objects or cells that will bind to a specific chemical group on the fiber.
