hello everybody,thanks for having me today. i'm a little bit injured,but it takes more than a car to stop me from talking to you. (applause) maybe a tank?!
best 3d cad software for 3d printing, so today i wantto talk about the microprinter, about my work,how everything started, what was my motivation behind to buildthe smallest 3d printer in the world, and let's startwith my daily business.
so, my normal working field is calledtwo photon polymerisation. it sounds very nerdy,it is very nerdy, and what do you needfor making this stuff? you need a complex laser system a so called femtosecond laser system which you focus to a very tiny spot,very, very, very tiny, and this is a very expensive,not very durable laser system. and on the other hand you needa very complex positioning system. we call it agathe,because it's very heavy
and we thought agathewas a nice name! (laughter) and, well, you need this systemto move the laser through, a sample, at a very accurate level,about 200 nanometers, so very accurate. and, well, what can you do with that? you can do thingsthat you cannot see with your eyes. so you can print outwhatever you want, you can print out a tower bridge,you can print out agathe's husband... ok, but, what makes it so mind-blowing?
you maybe notice this scale bar,and it's 100 microns for the tower bridge and 20 microns for the fat man, and for comparison,the diameter of a human here is about 50 microns, so these objectsare like a dust particle or even smaller, so you can hardly see them. what you can also doand what we are also working on, is improving the system,improving the resins, the material we use,for catching a worm, or something else;inside the resin we move
the laser through the resin,it gets polymerised, and we catch up a living animal,here's the special worm. what we're trying to do,or what the next step would be is to make biocompatible polymersand maybe to write some things inside your bodyor inside the body of a worm, or to attach cellsto our structures, and so on. but, ok, that's my normal working field,today i want to tell the story behind the microprinter,what was my motivation? everything started on monday morning,6:30 - ok that's a lie,
maybe it was 10 o'clock,when i went to my laserlab, which is located near karlsplatz,in freihaus, at the vienna universityof technology, and i went in and i sawthat this laser system was broken. and i tried to fix that,it took me half a day, took me several hours,and then i noticed that there is a major issuewith the pump source. i cannot fix that myselfso we have to call the service technician. and from that point oni noticed i have time to think.
i thought, what to do know,maybe start to write my phd thesis... no, no, not a good idea at all,so i started thinking, maybe write a scientific paper...not a good idea at all. and then, on saturday,after a week of thinking, i came up with the idea to buildthe smallest 3d microprinter in the world, or the smallest 3d printer in the world. so i called my professorand told him about it. " hey! let's build the thing!and i have time!" and he said "ok, go ahead, build it!"
and so i went to the universityand from that point on i just put everythingout of my brain inside the computer to make this cad constructionof the whole stuff, and after a few months,we had the first test run with the system, it works brilliantly from the first test,and it had the same resolution as systems which cost 60,000 euros and we only spent 1,500 eurosfor the system, not including my salary,but that wouldn't add so much on its own. ok, how does this work?
i brought you a videowhere you can see how you can putin your three dimensional file. this video has been producedby a friend of mine, junior veloso. and you can see you have a set stagewhich moves up. and under the set stage is a liquidwhich gets solidified by the light. and slice by slice,you create the model so you really pull it out of the liquid. and it just dependson how big is your model. so maybe it's 100 slices, 1.000ten thousand slices...
so, that's how it works. of course, thos is a much bigger machinethan the micro printer but it uses more or lessthe same principles, so that's what i want to show you. at the end, this head, this alien head, is attached to the building platform,and when the process is done you just simply have to break the headfrom the support structure you need, and then everything is ready. ok, but [what] does the micro printerlook like?
well maybe some of youhave already seen this picture, i also brought it to you in person,so i want to kindly introduce you to the 3d micro printerwhich looks like this. so it's very small,so it's really a desktop version, it's really an affordable system. and we are really proud of it,actually, and, you have this tiny little system,there are bigger ones. what can you dowith a cheap, affordable system? for example,you all know these hearing aids?
they have to be produced individually for each person,so this is a perfect example for using this technologyto create the shell for a hearing aid. normally you go to the store,they scan your ear, they send the data to germany,via email, and they print it out... thank you. then they print it out with a big machineand then when it's ready to send it back to vienna,or wherever you are
via post, then they put in the electronic. when you havea micro printer in your store, so you can go to the store,they scan your ear, they just press print, the 3d model gets sliced,and you can go for a coffee, you can go to the university,whatever you want and instead of 5 days,you can have your ear shell, or your hearing aid, in just one day.
and that is an exampleof how these tiny little machines,
or other cheap 3d printers,could change our everyday lives. so thank you very much,and start printing whatever you want,whatever you need.
