New Delhi: Researchers, including Indian-origin scientists, have 3-D printed a loudspeaker which is ready for use almost as soon as it comes out of the printer.
The project was led by Apoorva Kiran and Robert MacCurdy, graduate students in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, who worked with Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and a leading 3D printing innovator.
"Everything is 3D printed," said Kiran, while demonstrating the newly printed mini speaker and connecting it to amplifier wires.
For the demo, the amplifier played a clip from US President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech that mentioned 3D printing.
A loudspeaker is a relatively simple object. It consists of plastic for the housing, a conductive coil and a magnet. The challenge is coming up with a design and the exact materials that can be co-fabricated into a functional shape, Kiran said.
Lipson said he hopes this simple demonstration is just the "tip of the iceberg." 3D printing technology could be moving from printing passive parts toward printing active, integrated systems, he said.
But it will be a while before consumers are printing electronics at home, Lipson continued. Most printers cannot efficiently handle multiple materials.
It's also difficult to find mutually compatible materials - for example, conductive copper and plastic coming out of the same printer require different temperatures and curing times.
In the case of the speaker, Kiran used a customisable research printer originally developed by Lipson and former graduate student and lab member Evan Malone, that allows scientists to tinker with different cartridges, control software and other parameters.
For the conductor, Kiran used a silver ink. For the magnet, he employed the help of Samanvaya Srivastava, graduate student in chemical and biomolecular engineering, to come up with a viscous blend of strontium ferrite.
It's not the first time a consumer electronic device was printed in Lipson's lab.
Back in 2009, Malone and former lab member Matthew Alonso printed a working replica of the Vail Register, the famous antique telegraph receiver and recorder that Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail used to send the first Morse code telegraph in 1844.
