Scaled down 3D printing
Contents
3D printing @ nanoscale – a bad idea for several reasons
Plastic polymers are too granular at the nanoscale so it must be
- either 3D printing of metal
- or 3D printing of glass (some molten low melting gem).
This still faces fatal problems:
- Products would not be useful
- Printer would be difficult to make
Products too bad in quality to be useful
– With pure metals surfaces will rapidly oxidize, swell, and crack even in UHV due the remnant gases.
Working nano-encapsulated to get a true vacuum PPV environment is 100% impossible in early systems.
If one uses a noble metal to avoid oxidation then one can't make any moving interfaces
due to instant metallic welding on any and all contact between parts.
Assuming as workaround one uses a low melting gem that monolayer surface oxidizes
(not sure if such a gem exists) then …
– The lack of atomic precision of parts would still lead to enormous wear rates (and friction).
More concretely: The asymmetry from lack of atomic precision cause stiction forces (like in MEMS)
and create concentrated stresses at imperfections on bearing surface.
These stresses break of pieces and cause avalanche effects destroying bearings in short order.
One can have digital control over matter without atomic precision, yes, but
only if the internally analog base parts are sufficiently long lasting.
Not the case for the products here.
Non atomically precide procuction techniques (being it subtractive Feynman path or additive like here)
generally suffer a growing relative (percentual) error when going down in scale.
That's what makes these approaches infeasible.
Difficulty in making a nanoscale 3D printer (as early system)
One may try some sort of nanoscale thin plating atop a (relatively giant) microfluidic channel (with nozzle protrusion).
Then ion beam etching a nanoscale hole in the protrusion.
Viscosity is not favorable at such small scales.
So a long thin channel won't work at all. An ideal channel will still be slow in extrusion.
3D printing @ microscale – maybe in some special advanced system contexts
There is a related tech that may become useful in future advanced systems.
This would be microscale (not nanoscale) 3D printing for food (and organ) synthesis in future advanced systems.
Combined with microfluidically micromanaged cell growth.
See: Synthesis of food
Related
- Pure metals and metal alloys
- Oxidation
- Oxidation being part of: Common critique towards diamondoid atomically precise manufacturing and technology
- Passivation (disambiguation) & Practically perfect vacuum
- Gemstone-like compound & Gemstone
- (The defining traits of gem-gum-tec)
- Digital control over reversibly composable units of matter
- Feynman path
- Synthesis of food
