Harvard researchers develop multinozzle 3D printer that can switch between 8 inks

You might be aware that most commercial extrusion-based 3D printers are only able to build objects from a single material at a time. And when they do allow for multiple materials and colors to be used, the process is slow. Researchers at Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new technique called multimaterial multinozzle 3D printing (MM3D). According to the researchers, this technique enables a single printhead to switch between multiple different materials, up to 50 times per second. What does this multinozzle 3D printer bring to the AM industry?

This technique uses high-speed pressure valves to achieve rapid, continuous and seamless switching, as mentioned it can switch up to 50 times in one second. Additionally, the printhead can switch between 8 different printing materials. Researchers explained that the printhead developed can range from a single nozzle to large multinozzle arrays, these were also 3D printed to allow for their rapid customization.

MM3D printing allows to seamlessly switch between multiple different materials up to 50 times per second, greatly streamlining the process of printing complex structures. | Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Co-first author Mark Skylar-Scott, Ph.D. a Research Associate at the Wyss Institute develops on the benefits of this new technique: “When printing an object using a conventional extrusion-based 3D printer, the time required to print it scales cubically with the length of the object, because the printing nozzle has to move in three dimensions rather than just one. MM3D’s combination of multinozzle arrays with the ability to switch between multiple inks rapidly effectively eliminates the time lost to switching printheads and helps get the scaling law down from cubic to linear, so you can print multimaterial, periodic 3D objects much more quickly.”