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New 3D printing technique allows mass production of microscale components for medicine, manufacturing, and other applications; high-throughput technique can fabricate up to 1 million components per day

A new process for microscale 3D printing creates particles of nearly any shape for applications in medicine, manufacturing, research and more – at the pace of up to 1 million particles a day.

“We can now create much more complex shapes down to the microscopic scale, at speeds that have not been shown for particle fabrication previously, and out of a wide range of materials,” said Jason Kronenfeld, PhD candidate in the DeSimone lab at Stanford and lead author of the paper that details this process, published today in Nature. And, of course, macroscopic 3D printing has already gained a foothold (literally) in mass manufacturing, in the form of shoes, household goods, machine parts, football helmets, dentures, hearing aids, and more. “Our approach is distinctively capable of producing high-resolution outputs while preserving the fabrication pace required to meet the particle production volumes that experts consider essential for various applications.

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