3D Printed Organs and Batteries in the Not-too Distant Future

Kyle Maxey | November  2013
Engineering.com

Surveys conducted by the German Organ Transplantation Foundation (DSO) say the number of organ transplant donors has plummeted 18 percent in the past year. With the demand for organ transplants increasingly overtaking supply, physicians are hopeful that new technologies (such as 3D printing) could one day fill in these gaps.

As a first big step, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB) in Stuttgart recently announced that they’ve created a bio-ink suitable for printing a number of tissue types.

The key to the new ink’s versatility is its gelatin base. Gelatin, a derivative of collagen, is one of the main constituents of human tissues. While gelatin is normally in a gelatinous state at room temperature, the IGB researchers have created a way to keep the material in a liquid form. This makes it easier for the 3D printer to manipulate the material, depositing it onto a sterile sheet where it can then be cured with a UV light and rendered solid.

According to the IGB, “researchers can control the chemical modification of the biological molecules so that the resulting gels have differing strengths and swelling characteristics. The properties of natural tissue can therefore be imitated – from solid cartilage to soft adipose tissue.”

While 3D printed organs are still a long way off, IGB’s material is an important step forward in this burgeoning medical field. “Only once we are successful in producing tissue that can be nourished through a system of blood vessels can printing larger tissue structures become feasible,” says IGB researcher Dr. Kirsten Borcher.

In the coming decades, the population of elderly people will dramatically rise around the world, increasing the demand for advanced biotechnology. If 3D printing technology can mature in time to meet these growing demands, it will find a huge market and be able to contribute to a higher quality of life.

New inks and tools allow 3-D printing of lithium-ion technology.

By Mike Orcutt | November 2013
MIT Technology Review

By making the basic building blocks of batteries out of ink, Harvard materials scientist Jennifer Lewis is laying the groundwork for lithium-ion batteries and other high-performing electronics that can be produced with 3-D printers.

Although the technology is still at an early stage, the ability to print batteries and other electronics could make it possible to manufacture new kinds of devices. Think of self-powered biomedical sensors, affixed to the skin, that would continuously transmit vital signs to a smartphone. Or existing products could be made more simply and efficiently.

For example, the plastic shell of a hearing aid is already 3-D printed for a custom fit inside a wearer’s ear. But the electronics are manufactured separately, and the batteries are often the type that must be replaced frequently. If the electronics and a rechargeable battery were printed together, the final product could be made more rapidly and seamlessly.

Lewis has taken two important steps toward printing electronic devices. First, she has invented an arsenal of what she calls functional inks that can solidify into batteries and simple components, including electrodes, wires, and antennas. Second, she has developed nozzles and high-pressure extruders that squeeze out the batteries and other components from an industrial-grade 3-D printer. Lewis’s inks use suspended nanoparticles of the desired materials, such as compounds of lithium for batteries and silver for wires. These materials are mixed into a variety of solutions, and the resulting inks are nearly solid when unperturbed but flow when a certain amount of pressure is applied. Once printed, the materials return to solid form. Printing a battery from a single nozzle can take minutes, but Lewis’s custom 3-D printing technology can deposit inks from hundreds of nozzles at the same time.

The printing technology works at room temperature, not the high temperatures normally required to work with high-performing electronics. That makes it possible to print the materials on plastic without causing damage. The battery materials themselves aren’t revolutionary, she says; “this is really more a revolution in the way things are manufactured.”

Her printed lithium-ion batteries are as tiny as one millimeter square but perform as well as commercial batteries, because Lewis can render microscale architectures, and position structures with 100-nanometer accuracy, to mirror the structures of much bigger batteries.

Lewis’s group holds eight patents for its inks and is working on licensing and commercializing the technology in the next few years. Although she says the initial plan is to provide tools for manufacturers, she may eventually produce a low-end printer for hobbyists.

“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds

And the Department of Justice says there's nothing illegal about it, either.

by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 1 2013

Ars Technica

The white portion of this AR-15, known as the "lower," was manufactured using 3D printing.

Defense Distributed

Cody Wilson, like many of his Texan forebears, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to further his agenda.

Wilson’s non-profit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.

Last year, his group famously demonstrated that they could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and can seemingly fire for quite awhile. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.)

The “lower,” or lower receiver part of a firearm, is the crucial part that contains all the gun's operating parts, including the trigger group, and the magazine port. (Under American law, the lower is what's defined as the firearm itself.) The AR is designed to be modular, meaning it can receive different types of “uppers” (barrels) as well as different-sized magazines.

“This is the first publicly printed AR lower demonstrated to withstand a large volume of .223 without structural degradation or failure,” Wilson wrote on Wednesday. “The actual count was 660+ on day 1 with the SLA lower. The test ended when we ran out of ammunition, but this lower could easily withstand 1,000 rounds.”

Already, he says, over 10,000 people have downloaded the lower CAD file, with more on BitTorrent.

"I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak"

While it may be easy to paint Wilson as a 2nd Amendment-touting conservative, the 25-year-old second-year law student at the Univeristy of Texas, Austin told Ars on Thursday that he’s actually a “crypto-anarchist.”

“I believe in evading and disintermediating the state,” he said.

“It seemed to be something we could build an organization around. Just like Bitcoin can circumvent financial mechanisms. This means you can make something that is contentious and politically important—not just a multicolored cookie cutter—but something important. It’s more about disintermediating some of these control schemes entirely and there’s increasingly little that you can do about it. That’s no longer a valid answer.”

He added, “The message is in what we’re doing—the message is: download this gun.”

And he practices what he preaches: the group’s entire set of design files are made available, for free, on DEFCAD, an online library for everything from grips to lowers to magazines.

“I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak,” he added. “[I’ve got a] Glock 17, we got a bunch coming, man. We’ve got a library of magazines.”

Wilson’s group was founded last year on similar principles:

The specific purposes for which this corporation is organized are: To defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.

Here are .223 Remington bullets loaded into a 3D-printed magazine.

Defense Distributed

Totally legal

So that raises the question: is this legal? For now, it would appear so.

“There are no restrictions on an individual manufacturing a firearm for personal use,” a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) spokesperson told Ars. “However, if the individual is engaged in business as a firearms manufacturer, that person must obtain a manufacturing license.”

Wilson said that he’s applied for a federal firearms license in his own name with the ATF in October, and expects to hear a response “any day now.” The ATF did not respond to our request for confirmation of Wilson’s claims.

Specifically, Wilson said he's looking eventually to become a Class 2 Special Occupational Taxpayer, as licensed under federal law (PDF), which would allow him to become a dealer under the National Firearms Act.

The law student said that anyone with the same type of 3D printer (“SLA resin and P400 ABS on a used Dimension”) could replicate his efforts with “9 to 12 hours” of print time, and “$150 to $200” in parts, adding that “we’ve proven that you can build one for $50,” presuming the builder is using lower quality materials. (Dimensions typically sell in the $30,000 range—but Wilson says his results could be duplicated using the less-expensive Ultimaker ($1500) or Reprap.”

Assuming Defense Distributed’s AR-15 lower costs around $150 to print, it likely wouldn’t end up being price-competitive with other, commercially-available polymer AR-15 lowers—a few minutes of Google searching turned up options priced at $135 to $170, depending on the manufacturer.

Of course, lots of 3D printing enthusiasts extol the fact that the price of the technology is rapidly falling—as we reported previously, a California company announced a $600 model last year.

Some experts who have been following the world of 3D printing for a while say that from a policy perspective, not much has changed in terms of firearm production, even if is cheaper to make.

“When you're thinking about it from a policy standpoint [the question is]: was this possible before 3D printing? If the answer is yes, what was the existing policy response?” said Michael Weinberg, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge.

“Has this fundamentally changed the dynamic in a way that we need to revisit the response? The answer strikes me as no—it's amazing. You can imagine a world where the 3D printer is accessible to people—I am not convinced that we need a 3D printing-specific solution.”

An earlier model of the 3D-printed AR-15 lower resulted in a crack by the rear takedown pin.

Defense Distributed

"The guns that will be"

Since December 2012, Wilson and his team have been hard at work on two problems. The first was the fact that the lower’s “buffer tower” (the circular ring part jutting upward that the “upper” fits into) kept breaking—that’s what caused the initial failure that prevented the gun from firing more than six rounds of 5.7x28FN bullets.

So to fix that, the group re-engineered the buffer tower so that it had increased exterior thickness. “We doubled or tripled the thickness,” Wilson said.

With that fix under their belt, the modern gunsmiths tried firing with .223 Remington bullets (standard in an AR-15), which raised the firing range to about 20 rounds before a failure—but that wasn’t good enough.

By the end of the month, there was a different failure, this time on the “rear takedown pin,” where a metal pin fits between the upper and the lower, connecting them together solidly. There, the 3D-printed plastic was cracking around the pin, making the gun less safe to use.

“There was so much force concentrating around it that that was the failure place,” Wilson said. “At first we started using bigger bosses and using longer pins, and realized that it’s still a cross-sectional area. We changed the dimensions of the rear takedown pins.”

He explained that they’ve changed pin design entirely, adding “more surface area around these pins,” as well as an “internal” 90-degree angle, along with various curves and “steps and risers,” that would take advantage of the fact that the housing was made of plastic, not metal.

“The thing was still built like it would be made out of metal,” he said. “This is about plastic and everything needs to be curves, it has to act like more of a spring.”

And that, he points out, is the ultimate lesson in gun manufacture.

“The idea is not to print components for guns that are, but the guns that will be,” he said.

For now though, Wilson said that Defense Distributed has essentially taken over the bulk of his time, and he’s effectively become a part-time amateur engineer.

“I don’t go to [law school] class, but I do pass the exams—here’s looking at you [American Bar Association]!” he told Ars.

Defense Distributed, Wilson says, receives “around $100” in daily donations and has an operating budget of about $2,400 monthly. He says that the next phase will be to publish “primers” teaching people specifically how to make such weapons.

“I don’t consider myself a tech guy, but I do consider myself a crypto-anarchist,” he said.

“I mean the philosophy that Tim May expressed, he predicted WikiLeaks and digital currency. [What I mean is] that the Internet and cryptography are these anarchic tools that can allow for the expanse of citizen action. We like the idea of the market becoming completely black and starving the nation-state from all the money they claim.”

(Thanks to Ars editor Sean Gallagher, a Navy veteran, for helping me with all my gun questions.)