Deconvolution volumetric additive manufacturing.

Volumetric additive manufacturing techniques are a promising pathway to ultra-rapid light-based 3D fabrication. Their widespread adoption, however, demands significant improvement in print fidelity. Currently, volumetric additive manufacturing prints suffer from systematic undercuring of fine features, making it impossible to print objects containing a wide range of feature sizes, precluding effective adoption in many applications.

Ethyl Cellulose-Based Thermoreversible Organogel Photoresist for Sedimentation-Free Volumetric Additive Manufacturing.

Liquid photoresists are abundant in the field of light-based additive manufacturing (AM). However, printing unsupported directly into a vat of material in emerging volumetric AM technologies-typically a benefit due to fewer geometric constraints and less material waste-can be a limitation when printing low-viscosity liquid monomers and multimaterial constructs due to part drift or sedimentation. With ethyl cellulose (EC), a thermoplastic soluble in organic liquids, a simple three-component transparent thermoreversible gel photoresist with melting temperature of ≈64 °C is formulated.

Sectorization of Macromolecular Single Crystals Unveiled by Probing Shear Anisotropy.

Polymer single crystals continue to infiltrate emerging technologies such as flexible organic field-effect transistors because of their excellent translational symmetry and chemical purity. However, owing to the methodological challenges, direct imaging of the polymer chains folding direction resulting in sectorization of single crystals has rarely been investigated. Herein, we directly image the sectorization of polymer single crystals through anisotropic elastic deformation on the surface of macromolecular single crystals.

Volumetric additive manufacturing of silica glass with microscale computed axial lithography.

Glass is increasingly desired as a material for manufacturing complex microscopic geometries, from the micro-optics in compact consumer products to microfluidic systems for chemical synthesis and biological analyses. As the size, geometric, surface roughness, and mechanical strength requirements of glass evolve, conventional processing methods are challenged. We introduce microscale computed axial lithography (micro-CAL) of fused silica components, by tomographically illuminating a photopolymer-silica nanocomposite that is then sintered.

Latent image volumetric additive manufacturing.

Volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) enables rapid printing into a wide range of materials, offering significant advantages over other printing technologies, with a lack of inherent layering of particular note. However, VAM suffers from striations, similar in appearance to layers, and similarly limiting applications due to mechanical and refractive index inhomogeneity, surface roughness, etc. We hypothesize that these striations are caused by a self-written waveguide effect, driven by the gelation material nonlinearity upon which VAM relies, and that they are not a direct recording of non-uniform patterning beams.

Object-Space Optimization of Tomographic Reconstructions for Additive Manufacturing.

Volumetric 3D printing motivated by computed axial lithography enables rapid printing of homogeneous parts but requires a high dimensionality gradient-descent optimization to calculate image sets. Here we introduce a new, simpler approach to image-computation that algebraically optimizes a model of the printed object, significantly improving print accuracy of complex parts under imperfect material and optical precision by improving optical dose contrast between the target and surrounding regions. Quality metrics for volumetric printing are defined and shown to be significantly improved by the new algorithm.

Recent advances in microfluidic methods in cancer liquid biopsy.

Early cancer detection, its monitoring, and therapeutical prediction are highly valuable, though extremely challenging targets in oncology. Significant progress has been made recently, resulting in a group of devices and techniques that are now capable of successfully detecting, interpreting, and monitoring cancer biomarkers in body fluids. Precise information about malignancies can be obtained from liquid biopsies by isolating and analyzing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) or nucleic acids, tumor-derived vesicles or proteins, and metabolites.

Volumetric additive manufacturing via tomographic reconstruction.

Additive manufacturing promises enormous geometrical freedom and the potential to combine materials for complex functions. The speed, geometry, and surface quality limitations of additive processes are linked to their reliance on material layering. We demonstrated concurrent printing of all points within a three-dimensional object by illuminating a rotating volume of photosensitive material with a dynamically evolving light pattern.

Highlighting the uniqueness in dielectrophoretic enrichment of circulating tumor cells.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) play an essential role in the metastasis of tumors, and thus can serve as a valuable prognostic factor for malignant diseases. As a result, the ability to isolate and characterize CTCs is essential. This review underlines the potential of dielectrophoresis for CTCs enrichment.

Controlled folding of graphene: GraFold printing.

We have used elastomeric stamps with periodically varying adhesive properties to introduce structure and print folded graphene films. The structure of the induced folds is investigated with scanning probe techniques, high-resolution electron-microscopy, and tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Furthermore, a finite element model is developed to show the fold formation process.

Large-area and high-resolution distortion measurement based on Moiré fringe method for hot embossing process.

A Moiré fringe approach is developed to identify simultaneously the global and local distortions in hot-embossed polymeric samples. A square grid pattern with a pitch of 63.5 microm is hot-embossed on the polymer substrate.