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3D nano-printing

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23 points6ren10 comments

It's not that I'm not impressed, but this is closer to micro-printing than nano-printing, looking at the "20µm" line at the bottom of the image.

That 20 µm is the size of the whole structure. Look at the details (like the placement of the nose), this precision is in the order of 10-100 nm.

When I wrote the above comment, I was ballparking it to be around 100nm, which I think is closer to µm than nm.

Looking a bit closer at it, I would say that the bands you see on the feet and body seems like the "precision" of the system. These are around 4 pixels wide. The 20µm ruler is 84 pixels wide, giving us 20µm / 84pixels ≈ 0.25µm/pixels.

So the band is 4 pixels * 0.25µm/pixels = 1µm. (Assuming my premises are right)

That's pretty amazing. I had the privilege of demoing repraps to a Vienna UT researcher a while ago, and he reciprocated by giving me and my friends a tour of the 3D printers at their institute. The 2-photon printing facility was already in place (and oh my is it impressive), but it hadn't made a lot of interesting stuff at the time - I think they were focusing on fabbing organic molecules at the time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't as fast as this - 4 minutes for a sculpture of that size, at that level of detail is pretty great.

That was about 2 years ago now. Very glad to see they made such great progress in the meantime (-:

source & video: http://www.tuwien.ac.at/en/news/news_detail/article/7444/

In this picture: http://in.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=INRT..., are there gaps in the bridge structure? It's very impressive.

Is this the same as CUBE. mentioned in the above

No, not remotely. Cube is a traditional 3d printer with a resolution of 0.25mm. This is 3d printing on the atomic scale effectively; many, many orders of magnitude higher resolution.

Not true at all: the scale bar says 20um, which is 0.020mm. This is 20,000 nanometers or about 200,000 atoms. Not even remotely atomic (nevertheless impressing, because it is really 3D).

Oh wow, my math was way off. Thanks for the correction.

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