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www.3ders.org 2015 02285.txt.txt

#New filament is 1, 000 times more conductive than existing filaments on the market May 21, 2015 By Simonconsidering all of the developments that wee been seeing in the space of both new 3d printers and 3d printing filament in the past six months alone, there a lot for makers, designers, engineers, medical professionals and others that regularly make use of additive manufacturing technologies to get excited about. Of all of the recent developments wee seen in 2015 however, it is perhaps the 3d printing materials themselves that have been making a huge splash. Previously, wee seen how Made in Space is making their pace-approvedfilament available to the general public for creating their own pace-readytools and parts as well as developments in making 3d printing material recipes open source-such as Autodesk decision to release the recipe of their Ember 3d printer resin. Now, scientists from Singapore have invented a new type of thermoplastic filament that can be used in existing 3d printers to create functional circuits for use in electrical gadgets. The scientists, who hail from Singapore A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), have used successfully this new material to print various electronic prototypes including a USB connector that can light up a LED bulb, complex three-dimensional circuits and a wearable, flexible sensor. believe this will revolutionise desktop manufacturing for electronic gadgets, said Dr Johnson Goh, who is leading the group as the Principal investigator and is currently the Head of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) Nanofabrication and Characterization Group. Through their research, the team found that the resistivity of their thermoplastic material is in the range of 0. 5-1. 0 Wcm-or roughly 1, 000 times more conductive than most existing commercially available plastic filaments for 3d printing. In comparison, Protoplant conductive PLA filament has a resistivity of about 15 Wcm -which makes IMRE material at least 15 times more conductive. In addition, Makergeeksconductive ABS filament has a resistivity of roughly 1 000wcm-which makes IMRE material at least 1, 000 times more conductive. While experimenting with their material, the team found that using the material to 3d print circuits rather than creating circuits through traditional fabrication methods such as etching -and-soldering was not only cheaper and faster, but also safer. Additionally, the circuits have highly uniform conductivity, with less than a 5 percent variation, compared to more than a hundred percent in commercially available conductive filaments. bjects in various colours, shapes and textures complete with functional circuits including wires, resistors and capacitors, could one day be printed in the comfort of one home, said Dr Kwok Sen Wai, a scientist who worked alongside Goh on the project. IMRE is currently looking for industry partners to help commercialize the technology with a focus on enabling entrepreneurs and small businesses to create circuits quickly and easily using existing desktop 3d printers rather than entirely new systems. e believe that our material will encourage more innovation and entrepreneurship as it will empower people to make prototypes more easily and cheaply, added Dr. Kwok. Posted in 3d printing Materials (adsbygoogle=window. adsbygoogle. push({}Maybe you also like:(function(){var po=document. createelement('script';'po. type='text/javascript';'po. async=true; po. src='https://apis. google. com/js/plusone. js';'var s=document. getelementsbytagname('script')0; s. parentnode. insertbefore (po, s;(;lang: en us i

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