Nanoscale 3D Printing

Researchers Combine Simulation, Experiment for Nanoscale 3-D Printing

PhysOrg | August 8, 2016

Designing a 3-D printed structure is hard enough when the product is inches or feet in size. Imagine shrinking it smaller than a drop of water, smaller even than a human hair, until it is dwarfed by a common bacterium.
This impossibly small structure can be made a reality with focused electron beam induced deposition, or FEBID, to essentially 3-D print at the nanoscale. FEBID uses an electron beam from a scanning electron microscope to condense gaseous precursor molecules into a solid deposit on a surface.

"A 285 µm long race car, 3D-printed at the Vienna University of Technology." As small scale as this is, newer methods exist to print at even smaller scales. The following link also shows a video of the fabrication of this car. Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=37541.php

"A 32-face 3-D truncated icosahedron mesh was created to test the simulation’s ability to precisely construct complex geometries. The SEM image of the final experimental product (left) was highly consistent with the structure predicted by the virtual SEM image (center) and the simulated design model (right)." Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-combine-simulation-nanoscale-d.html

<more at http://phys.org/news/2016-08-combine-simulation-nanoscale-d.html; related articles and links: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=37541.php (Nanotechnology and 3D-printing. September 26, 2014) and https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/nanoscale-3d-getting-better-91676/ (Nanoscale 3D printing, have we cracked it? August 9, 2016)>