4D printing - new front

Skylar Tibbitts

Today we are witnessing how incredible new materials and industrial methods are changing the basic principles of design, borrowing methods of nano and biotechnology, but at the macro level.

The current generation of three-dimensional additive printing technology is limited to several types of plastics and soft metal materials from which CAD-based products are formed. That is why four-dimensional technologies have such enormous potential.
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Advances in nano and biotechnology are applied at the macro level: incredible new materials can be programmed so that they change shape over time. Earlier this week I spent a little time with Carlos Olguin, head of the bionanoprogrammed material group at Autodesk, and yesterday I talked with Skylar Tibbits from MTI and Shelly Linor and Daniel Dikovsky from Stratasys. I was interested in learning more about this new industry, what forms it takes and how it all works.

When talking about 4D printing, the fourth dimension is the property of materials to change and mutate over time under the influence of water, temperature and / or air for the purpose of self-assembly. Soon, 4D-object formats will get their API, with which designers can choose arbitrary characteristics of the materials from which objects are created. They are then printed using accurate chemical calibrations, giving them the desired properties and functionality.

Like the movement of self-made computers in the 1970s, which led to the emergence of DOS and the first personal computers, today's “four-dimensional” front (the author of the 4D term in this context is Skylar Tibbits) also consists of very curious participants. Autodesk plays an increasingly important role in life science by providing design tools for working at the nanoscale, based on its universal design solutions in architecture and mechanics. And today, Autodesk is well aware that the microcosm affects the macrocosm. Research in this new world is led by the scientific community, but it collaborates with Autodesk and other participants to democratize this space. This is done using standards and APIs that programmers and designers will use.

Stratasys has been working in this field since 1989, and her experience in 3D printers, fast office prototyping systems and direct digital production solutions are very useful here. Late last year, Stratasys merged with Objet Geometries. Today, these two companies play a key role in manufacturing processes. Organovo creates biological 3D printers: its “bioplotter” can form living tissue from living cells, and over time it can “print” out whole organs. Now Organovo collaborates with Autodesk on the creation of software for 3D-design. All these companies are interesting in and of themselves, but in the aggregate, by combining efforts, they create simply incredible innovations.

According to Carlos Olguin from Autodesk, the goal of all this work is to democratize this area so that ordinary people, without a PhD in chemistry and life science, can experiment in it. Shelly Linor, Global Director of Education at Stratasys, told me about the ASTM F2915 XML file format (.amf) called Additive Manufacturing, which standardizes those features that Autodesk and others can use to create their own designs. This file describes the geometric properties of objects — how they are used to define sequences and mixtures of materials. Autodesk will soon launch the Cyborg project, and now you can download a 3D-modeling program 123D .



Synergy and collaboration between these companies and the Self Assembly lab at MIT, led by Skylar Tibbitts and other research groups, reveal a variety of promising areas of research. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the trend is the progress in 4D materials, generating new ways of thinking. Self-repairing jeans made from biological materials, flat furniture in vacuum packaging, gathering itself under the influence of the atmosphere, objects that are assembled and disassembled depending on temperature - all this may seem fantastic, but in these areas quite real research is being conducted. As in printed human organs, more than one year will pass before tangible results, but goals are already clearly defined and innovations are already taking place.

When polymers and plastics appeared in the late 1950s, an explosion of innovation occurred (say, the modern Lego designer was patented on January 28, 1958). It took another five years to find the right material for mass production - acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or an ABS copolymer. However, attempts to create 4D-objects in the then relatively rough chemical experiments gave rise to very few new toys and, by and large, except for the hype in the press led to nothing. On the other hand, mass production of plastics has changed the world.

Today we are entering a new era with inverted rules of the game: a new generation of “programmers of matter, not computers” (phrase of Skylar Tibbitts) curbs the natural self-assembly order of things in the universe for small-scale production of products.

This is already happening: Autodesk bought Instructables, more and more work from Thingiverse and defcad, more and more actively involved in the 3D and 4D open source community. Today, MIT and printer companies widely use tools such as software for cross-platform voxel modeling and vox.cad analysis (a voxel is a three-dimensional volume pixel).

Materials play the most important role in these processes. Despite the current hype around 3D home printers, due to the high cost of consumables and the size of such printers, it will be difficult to cost industrial products, as Jonas Benzen showed in his blog . Today, three-dimensional printers are mainly used for prototyping and industrial design from soft model materials.

Some of our print concepts have already become outdated paradigms. This breakthrough will undoubtedly come from the field of chemistry of materials. As Daniel Dikowski from Stratasys explains, these will be mixtures of several materials that play the role of elements of the material program interface. Such modern alchemy, which can program the necessary properties of materials, will become a new key paradigm. Design principles based on the changing properties of these amazing new materials are slowly being formed. Although today there are still few such materials, titanic work is underway in this area with very rapid progress. After 4-5 years, we will see very advanced materials that can be programmed and printed. Fruitful cooperation, rapid progress and (for the time being) openness and inclusiveness of this sphere from a business point of view will lead to this.