In a development offering great promise for additive manufacturing, Princeton University researchers have created a method to precisely create droplets using a jet of liquid.
In a development offering great promise for additive manufacturing, Princeton University researchers have created a method to precisely create droplets using a jet of liquid. The technique allows manufacturers to quickly generate drops of material, finely control their size and locate them within a 3D space.
Although both 3D printers and traditional manufacturers already use droplets to carefully add material to their products, the new jet method offers greater flexibility and precision than standard techniques, the researchers said. For example, delivering droplets with jets allows for extremely small sizes and allows designers to change droplet sizes, shapes and dispersion, as well as patterns of droplets, on the fly.
“A key aspect is the simplicity of the method,” said Pierre-Thomas Brun, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher. “You draw something on the computer, and you can create it.”
Read more at Princeton Engineering
Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay
