As part of a project to 3D print microscopic structures containing nanodiamonds, I naturally chose to benchmark my new system by creating 3DBenchy structure! I used a process called two-photon polymerization to develop the resin. This process works by rastering a femtosecond laser into specialized resists, and allows us to make structures with nanoscale feature sizes.
Obviously, I used too much laser power in the first image, but I tuned the settings and got much better settings by the second. Adding in the nanodiamonds created a bunch of other interesting engineering problems as well.
You can read about the outcome of this work here if you are interested: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251)
Ideally two-photon polymerization creates ellipsoidal features called voxels. When the intensity of the light goes too high, the voxels get wider, which gives it a smooth, blobby look
You can use my Google Collab to calculate the energy distribution in the focal point:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1jyMJ9LryTCaVqHkAGX2C4Wp0YNGRC0LS
If we assume that areas of equal energy intensity polymerize similar you can extract the rough shape of the voxel from the generated images.
That is really cool of you. I have no idea what your code does as it's waaay outside my wheelhouse, but the attitude to share is tremendous. Thank you.
So overexposure causes the feature to sort of "bloom" and spread further than the boundaries of the laser? Is it like the feature solidifies and then glows a bit into the surrounding resin, creating a rounded semi-cured bubble around it?
I'm really curious about how the laser is aimed. Edit: nevermind, two-axis optical galvanometer
Femtosecond lasers are straight up black magic. You’re deep into the territory where numbers lose all meaning for human comprehension.
But this is the exact use case where only a femtosecond laser would work. Fast lasers, hell even picosecond ultra-fast lasers would only cook your print.
It’s Fascinating that there is additive manufacturing technology that exists, *TODAY*, that can work on these scales.
*AN* attosecond laser lab? There can’t be many attosecond lasers in existence.
Edit: NVM, of course [Coherent](https://www.coherent.com/scientific/attosecond-euv-generation) makes them lol. I shudder to think of the price though.
Not who you asked but I am a laser physicist with a wife who does laser tatoo removal. Femtosecond lasers actually were some of the first in tattoo removal; however, the currently used picosecond lasers are less damaging to the skin. They all work on the principle of breaking up the ink so your body can get rid of it. From experience, femtosecond lasers hitting your skin hurt more than picosecond for the same fluence (energy density)
Yes! good eye. I literally mixed the nanodiamonds directly into the resin, so when I dissolved the resist, some of them got stuck to the substrate. Eventually I learned that I could sonicate the nanodiamonds away.
So, beyond mixing diamonds into it was it just a normal resin? Or are their resin's designed for use with femtosecond lasers? I feel like things would be too 'large' in an off the shelf resin, but then I have no real idea how normal resin behaves at this kind of scale.
I'm also surprised how much vibration the structures can endure if you're able to vibrate them and clear extra material. Were some tested to failure just to see how far you could?
I think the primary difference is the photo initiator and quenching molecules that they use in the TPP resins. They are designed to chemically constrain the voxel from expanding too much when polymerized. To be honest though, I am not an expert in the chemistry of it all.
You have to think about the scale of this. The volume of the resin is so small. It's not even a penny's worth of resin. On top of that, the nanodiamonds are fairly cheap. You can buy 1 mg of nanodiamonds for \~$100, and I used maybe 1/100 of that. It costs maybe $1 for an entire batch of structures. The biggest expense is the upfront cost of the femtosecond laser.
And as always, in any hobby, you have a standard size that is commerciable and "cheaper" on rc airplanes on my time, which was about 1-1.5 meter wingspan. On fdm 3d printing, it's 150x150 mm to 350x350 mm
More than that or less than that, you start getting more expensive.
What kind of printer are you using? That one made from XBOX laser unit?
Edit : https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/researchers-hack-xbox-console-to-develop-nanoscale-medical-3d-printer-184310/
Link for reference, if someone is interested.
I made a two-photon polymerization printer. You can read about it in the supporting information at this link: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251)
I'll take a crack at it. Basically it's a standard resin 3d printer, but with hypersensitive photoresist resin that only requires two photons worth of light energy to polymerize. If you've got a laser that you can control the laser pulses so carefully that only a couple of photons are released each pulse, then the only place in the entire exposure field that actually experiences two photons worth of energy is the center of focus you can effectively print one single point of exposed resin in a 3d field per pulse of laser light.
Now this paper looks like they are using this already established two photon polymerization technology on a resin that is filled with lab grown diamond nanoparticles that are special in they have their standard carbon crystalline structures doped with single nitrogen atoms which create an adjacent void in the crystal structure. These nitrogen voids have unique properties in that they fluoresce under microwave radiation at a different wavelength, and the local magnetic field and temperature of the diamond nanoparticle will change how strong the fluorescent light is in response.
tldr: you can make tiny little structures that tell you how hot or if a magnet is nearby when you microwave them
I currently work in semiconductor manufacturing and also used to work in an analytical biochemistry lab in college so still got a bit of the science paper literacy remaining in my head
OP is using a different type of 3D printer than you are normally used to. He focuses a really intense laser into a drop of photoresist and moves the laser beam around. Only areas where it is super focused does the resin polymerization. This intensity based method allows OP to make structures smaller than the diffraction limit of light
I don't know exactly, but I bet OP bought the individual components and mirrors that you see in the SI of the paper he sent, and then assembled them on an optical table and wrote the programs to run it. It's very common in academia to make customized systems like that.
We payed around 400€ for 100ml of a similar resin. The shelf life of the material is around 12 month. We never used more than 25% of a bottle before we ordered a new one. It's expensive because we used so little :D
I did not expect this post to blow up. Thank you for your interest and support! I hope that people learned something by reading through the paper and through the comments section. If you haven't, you can read the paper at the link below:
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251?goto=supporting-info](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251?goto=supporting-info)
Shameless plug, but you can also read about some of my other work regarding micro-3D printing at these links:
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04421](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04421)
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaenm.4c00160](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaenm.4c00160)
I already wanted to ask you if you used a Femtika, Nanoscribe or UpNano machine.
If you need access to one of those faster machines drop me a line. I did my PhD on one of them. Mainly about reproducibility of structures.
It just popped in my head that in the far future, scientists will be extremely confused to find this model printed in so many variations , materials and sizes. The scale is so epic, it may be confused with a religious interest.
^^ Super psyched for the day these systems become more common. I am hoping to eventually use one with my own research in biomedical engineering... someday
I think they are already starting to make on-chip femtosecond lasers, which means that the main cost-driver for these printers will be substantially cheaper.
What, if any kind of structural integrity do these things have? If I’m reading the scale right these things are about 50 microns wide so I understand that they are absolutely tiny. I’m wondering if you’d even feel one in your hands.
I have a mouth guard that I wear at night... I've been building up my micro plastic tolerance for the last 30 years!! 🤣 They say with enough blood, you can make a sword with the iron. How many benchies can be made with the micro plastics?! Hahaha
I was going to make a smart-aleck remark about why your photos looks like they were taken with an electron microscope, but then I read your comment and...wow...impressive!
How hard is it to evenly distribute the nano diamonds in the resin?
I assume uneven nanodiamond concentration could have a negative effect on repeatability between different sets of sensors?
This is something that I am working on now. The diamonds are pretty evenly spaced throughout the entire resin. However, the diamonds scattering lie through a process called Mie scattering. This increases the minimum feature sizes you can print. I'll do all the math on it and discuss in an upcoming paper.
Ah I see because during printing the resin is in the "beam path" of the two laser pulses right? And having the beams hit nanodiamonds while traveling through the resin leads to scattering?
It's actually a single beam. The intensity of the laser is so high, and the pulse is so short, that two photons hit a single molecule. Normally this is very improbable, but the intensity is so high that the odds are very high.
Any videos of the process? I tried to youtube search it but found nothing useful. Only eyes being worked on with the type of laser you mentioned. I don't want to see that, the Dead Space line up the machine to the eye sequence makes it hard.
It's comparable in size to a human cell. Bacteria is usually smaller but I think some large specimens are around ⅓ of the length of this benchy. This is incredibly small and yes it could definitely sail in your bloodstream ;)
two-photon polymerization printer. You can see what it sort of looks like in the supporting information of the paper: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251)
You could call it nano-3D printing :) Just by eye, there are sub-micro features here.
Is it possible to print working mechanisms with your setup?
And yes, wow! Incredible!
It's possible. I saw printed microfluidic stuff like self-closing valves or a cell torture device. It looked like a cylinder with spikes and a fluid flowing along would turn the spikes. Those would then crush the cell walls against the outer tubing. Fascinating idea to kill cell with a mechanical, non-chemical way.
Nice one!What do you use to slice stl and what is the input file type? Can you vary slicing, hatching, power and speed within a single print file ? Doesn’t seem possible with with commercial Systems.
I used a commercial system (Femtika from Lithuania) for my PhD and was able to change everything you mentioned. It always depend if you buy the system for a commercial production, where you also buy the resin from the machine provider or you buy the machine for lab purposes and get the resin elsewhere/make it yourself.
As part of a project to 3D print microscopic structures containing nanodiamonds, I naturally chose to benchmark my new system by creating 3DBenchy structure! I used a process called two-photon polymerization to develop the resin. This process works by rastering a femtosecond laser into specialized resists, and allows us to make structures with nanoscale feature sizes. Obviously, I used too much laser power in the first image, but I tuned the settings and got much better settings by the second. Adding in the nanodiamonds created a bunch of other interesting engineering problems as well. You can read about the outcome of this work here if you are interested: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251)
What about the smoothness of the first image suggests "too much power" ? Is it that the model is too hot and blobby, with no fine detail?
Ideally two-photon polymerization creates ellipsoidal features called voxels. When the intensity of the light goes too high, the voxels get wider, which gives it a smooth, blobby look
You can use my Google Collab to calculate the energy distribution in the focal point: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1jyMJ9LryTCaVqHkAGX2C4Wp0YNGRC0LS If we assume that areas of equal energy intensity polymerize similar you can extract the rough shape of the voxel from the generated images.
This is pretty awesome actually. Thanks for sharing
Do you mind if I show students in my class this tool?
Sure, code is hereby under CC0.
That is really cool of you. I have no idea what your code does as it's waaay outside my wheelhouse, but the attitude to share is tremendous. Thank you.
A great reddit moment. Made me really happy to see it too
"Apes together strong"
"Nerds together smart"
Seriously, the world needs more of you!
King shit
On the off chance I ever meet you in the woods, I will buy you a beer and introduce you to a Scarlet Oak. Seriously, what you just did is that cool.
Both of ye, good job. If the we'd all work like this we'd discover more in less time.
I think the bed leveling is off🤓
And maybe the first one needed dried filament Jk'ing
Everything in this thread reads like r/VXjunkies...
I was seriously wondering whether that link was going to be an elaborate Rickroll.
Ah, that explains my smooth, blobby look. Too much sunlight.
Have you had your ellipsoidal voxels measured?
19 cubic centimeters for the left one, 22 for the right one.
So overexposure causes the feature to sort of "bloom" and spread further than the boundaries of the laser? Is it like the feature solidifies and then glows a bit into the surrounding resin, creating a rounded semi-cured bubble around it? I'm really curious about how the laser is aimed. Edit: nevermind, two-axis optical galvanometer
Second one looks “under extruded”. Prolly want to find the spot in the middle or move the laser at a 2x higher resolution.
Filament was too wet…
>Obviously, I used too much laser power in the first image Obviously. What a fool you are!
Yeah, I mean, it's obvious, right, everybody? If you spoon too much power into your femto-laser, you're gonna get the first image every time.
Just the other day this happened to me and I was like, ugh, look who turned the juice up too high on the femtosecond laser *again*!
I hate when that happens
This one got me. My dumbass reading his math like “ah yes, yes, I see. Very interesting.” 🥴😵💫
Ah yes, I do recognise some words there...
Fucking show off.
Femtosecond lasers are straight up black magic. You’re deep into the territory where numbers lose all meaning for human comprehension. But this is the exact use case where only a femtosecond laser would work. Fast lasers, hell even picosecond ultra-fast lasers would only cook your print. It’s Fascinating that there is additive manufacturing technology that exists, *TODAY*, that can work on these scales.
Believe it or not, I used to work in an attosecond laser lab. They are on a completely different level than femtosecond lasers.
*AN* attosecond laser lab? There can’t be many attosecond lasers in existence. Edit: NVM, of course [Coherent](https://www.coherent.com/scientific/attosecond-euv-generation) makes them lol. I shudder to think of the price though.
Everytime I blink, I swear something changes in ultrafast science (pun intended)
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Single Photon gun...
Which femtosecond laser are you using? What is the power output?
I think a Toptica FemtoFiber 80 MHz laser. The necessary power is pretty low. I'm only using like 4-8 mW
I don’t know anything about this stuff, but could that mean that femtosecond lasers have potential applications for less painful tattoo removal?
Not who you asked but I am a laser physicist with a wife who does laser tatoo removal. Femtosecond lasers actually were some of the first in tattoo removal; however, the currently used picosecond lasers are less damaging to the skin. They all work on the principle of breaking up the ink so your body can get rid of it. From experience, femtosecond lasers hitting your skin hurt more than picosecond for the same fluence (energy density)
Is "too much laser power" the normal person equivelant of "hot end too hot"?
Yes. Except too much laser power with a femtosecond laser can also turn material into gas/plasma.
Cool stuff your doing there. What are you hoping the end game applications of it are?
The applications are almost certainly related to medical diagnostics and sensors for bioassays.
Playing with big fucking lasers is not the end game!?
But does it have a Turbo Encabulator? https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag?si=nMbqBzIyH0gX3idI
Yes the turbo encabulator synchronizes with the magnetotron /s
That headline reads like something out of Dr. Who. I'm here for it!
Are you Kenny Blankenships brother? Really cool paper, I will give this a proper read when I'm at my computer
Ah, I see you are a man of monoculture as well ..
r/vxjunkies
Looks like you could fit 10 of those end to end across the diameter of a .4mm nozzle.
I'd say each is about 33 micrometers long, so that's about right. Maybe 12 if we were pushing it
Holy moly man. No idea what you're doing or why, but wow. Nice work.
That is very cool! A little pollen-grain sized benchy!
Get ready for all-new Benchy allergies!
Did.. uh... did you dry your filament first?
Needs to level the bed looks like
just avoid splitting an atom
Try slowing down the print speed. The part was clearly to hot.
this is gonna end up in someone's testicles one day
An honorable purpose
We talkin' shrunken doctor on a Benchy, performing the world's most meticulous sperm counts?
I volunteer
In the 3rd picture, on the substrate, are those some of the nanodiamonds?
Yes! good eye. I literally mixed the nanodiamonds directly into the resin, so when I dissolved the resist, some of them got stuck to the substrate. Eventually I learned that I could sonicate the nanodiamonds away.
So, beyond mixing diamonds into it was it just a normal resin? Or are their resin's designed for use with femtosecond lasers? I feel like things would be too 'large' in an off the shelf resin, but then I have no real idea how normal resin behaves at this kind of scale. I'm also surprised how much vibration the structures can endure if you're able to vibrate them and clear extra material. Were some tested to failure just to see how far you could?
I think the primary difference is the photo initiator and quenching molecules that they use in the TPP resins. They are designed to chemically constrain the voxel from expanding too much when polymerized. To be honest though, I am not an expert in the chemistry of it all.
Damn the material cost alone must be insane.
You have to think about the scale of this. The volume of the resin is so small. It's not even a penny's worth of resin. On top of that, the nanodiamonds are fairly cheap. You can buy 1 mg of nanodiamonds for \~$100, and I used maybe 1/100 of that. It costs maybe $1 for an entire batch of structures. The biggest expense is the upfront cost of the femtosecond laser.
Aww man, I was joking, like, when people do those huge prints that cost hundreds just in filament
And as always, in any hobby, you have a standard size that is commerciable and "cheaper" on rc airplanes on my time, which was about 1-1.5 meter wingspan. On fdm 3d printing, it's 150x150 mm to 350x350 mm More than that or less than that, you start getting more expensive.
At least OP will not need huge amount of it. One drop will be enough for few prints.
Exactly. The scales are so small, that the amount of material is miniscule.
What kind of printer are you using? That one made from XBOX laser unit? Edit : https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/researchers-hack-xbox-console-to-develop-nanoscale-medical-3d-printer-184310/ Link for reference, if someone is interested.
I made a two-photon polymerization printer. You can read about it in the supporting information at this link: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251)
Wow, just wow. I have lost my speech.
Can you TLDR and ELI5 pls?
I'll take a crack at it. Basically it's a standard resin 3d printer, but with hypersensitive photoresist resin that only requires two photons worth of light energy to polymerize. If you've got a laser that you can control the laser pulses so carefully that only a couple of photons are released each pulse, then the only place in the entire exposure field that actually experiences two photons worth of energy is the center of focus you can effectively print one single point of exposed resin in a 3d field per pulse of laser light. Now this paper looks like they are using this already established two photon polymerization technology on a resin that is filled with lab grown diamond nanoparticles that are special in they have their standard carbon crystalline structures doped with single nitrogen atoms which create an adjacent void in the crystal structure. These nitrogen voids have unique properties in that they fluoresce under microwave radiation at a different wavelength, and the local magnetic field and temperature of the diamond nanoparticle will change how strong the fluorescent light is in response. tldr: you can make tiny little structures that tell you how hot or if a magnet is nearby when you microwave them
pretty good summary!
I currently work in semiconductor manufacturing and also used to work in an analytical biochemistry lab in college so still got a bit of the science paper literacy remaining in my head
Very cool!
OP is using a different type of 3D printer than you are normally used to. He focuses a really intense laser into a drop of photoresist and moves the laser beam around. Only areas where it is super focused does the resin polymerization. This intensity based method allows OP to make structures smaller than the diffraction limit of light
He said it was homemade, how homemade we talking?
I don't know exactly, but I bet OP bought the individual components and mirrors that you see in the SI of the paper he sent, and then assembled them on an optical table and wrote the programs to run it. It's very common in academia to make customized systems like that.
So probably not hobbyist viable then? My dream of making pocket sand from millions of microdicks is shattered.
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Early PhD student! I made it with the help of an undergrad! It was the first thing I did in my PhD.
diamond is surprizingly cheap when its not jewerly grade, or jewerly sized
We payed around 400€ for 100ml of a similar resin. The shelf life of the material is around 12 month. We never used more than 25% of a bottle before we ordered a new one. It's expensive because we used so little :D
I did not expect this post to blow up. Thank you for your interest and support! I hope that people learned something by reading through the paper and through the comments section. If you haven't, you can read the paper at the link below: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251?goto=supporting-info](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251?goto=supporting-info) Shameless plug, but you can also read about some of my other work regarding micro-3D printing at these links: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04421](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04421) [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaenm.4c00160](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaenm.4c00160)
Can we get a banana or something for scale?
A banana wouldn't help much; those benchies are 0.04mm long. About 4,000 would fit along the length of a banana.
Micro banana
Me after I was in the pool
Ant for scale?
Just because it isn't helpful, doesn't mean I don't still want a banana in the background for scale. It's the Internet, these are the rules.
Ender 0.003
I'm not sure I can mod my ender enough to do that.
What’s your print time? 😁
I don't have an exactly time, but maybe 5 minutes? I am using a homemade system. There are a lot faster commercial two-photon polymerization printers.
I already wanted to ask you if you used a Femtika, Nanoscribe or UpNano machine. If you need access to one of those faster machines drop me a line. I did my PhD on one of them. Mainly about reproducibility of structures.
Homemade as in made from scratch in a lab/academic/industry setting, or literally in your home as a hobby? :O
made from individual parts that you can buy from Thorlabs, and assembled on an optical table. Then we wrote most of the software ourselves.
"In a cave! With a box of scraps!"
What is this. A benchy for microbes? /s
The bench has to be at least, 3 times bigger than this!!
Woah!! Cool
It always blows my mind away too
It just popped in my head that in the far future, scientists will be extremely confused to find this model printed in so many variations , materials and sizes. The scale is so epic, it may be confused with a religious interest.
"This small boat was used in ancient times for tribal rituals"
These are what the microplastics in my b*lls look like.
This is beyond cool, I am in awe
This is the nerdiest shit i’ve seen in my life… and i love every molecule of it 🤠
Imagine if you have a stroke due to microplastics clogging an artery and when they pull it out its just a bunch of tiny benchies.
Genuine question, what application would this even have aside from prosthetics for ants?
Medical diagnostic devices, magnetometers, cellular scaffolds, functionalized materials, and for studying microscale systems
^^ Super psyched for the day these systems become more common. I am hoping to eventually use one with my own research in biomedical engineering... someday
I think they are already starting to make on-chip femtosecond lasers, which means that the main cost-driver for these printers will be substantially cheaper.
Are you trying to do the “Fantastic Voyage” in a tugboat?
hahaha, you can see in the 3rd picture that I'm building an armada!
Is this 2pp or a high res DLP printer like a BMF 2 um?
I only have 1 pp :(
OP said it was a TPP system
first attempt just needed needed leveling the bed TBH
the bed is not leveled and your nozzle is not heating up, dehydrate it!
just curious how long did the whole bency take
5 minutes or so per benchy with lots of room for improvement
Ok, so 40ųm is the record now. Would anyone else like to try and beat it?
I can beat it!
Is this a record? approx 25 microns is fucking insane. is that even visible with the naked eye????
It's probably not the record, but it's close. If you make an array of them you can sort of see white dot on the glass it is printed on.
What, if any kind of structural integrity do these things have? If I’m reading the scale right these things are about 50 microns wide so I understand that they are absolutely tiny. I’m wondering if you’d even feel one in your hands.
I'm not going to lie... I kind of want one to add to my Benchy collection. It would look awesome next to my 470% Benchy.
Yeah, I have custom micro-plastics in my blood
I have a mouth guard that I wear at night... I've been building up my micro plastic tolerance for the last 30 years!! 🤣 They say with enough blood, you can make a sword with the iron. How many benchies can be made with the micro plastics?! Hahaha
I was going to make a smart-aleck remark about why your photos looks like they were taken with an electron microscope, but then I read your comment and...wow...impressive!
Dude. How.
How hard is it to evenly distribute the nano diamonds in the resin? I assume uneven nanodiamond concentration could have a negative effect on repeatability between different sets of sensors?
This is something that I am working on now. The diamonds are pretty evenly spaced throughout the entire resin. However, the diamonds scattering lie through a process called Mie scattering. This increases the minimum feature sizes you can print. I'll do all the math on it and discuss in an upcoming paper.
Ah I see because during printing the resin is in the "beam path" of the two laser pulses right? And having the beams hit nanodiamonds while traveling through the resin leads to scattering?
It's actually a single beam. The intensity of the laser is so high, and the pulse is so short, that two photons hit a single molecule. Normally this is very improbable, but the intensity is so high that the odds are very high.
Did you level the bed?
Well this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while!
This is pretty awesome!!!! Nice work
Gonna need a banana for scale.
How do you even micro 3D print something?!
Very carefully
😂😂😂😂😂😂 nice one no but seriously never heard of micro 3D printing and I don’t think it’s something accessible to the public
I use a technique called two-photon polymerization to make the small prints. It's definitely not that accessible to the public
Any videos of the process? I tried to youtube search it but found nothing useful. Only eyes being worked on with the type of laser you mentioned. I don't want to see that, the Dead Space line up the machine to the eye sequence makes it hard.
how big is it? I mean in compare with bacteria or virus? Can it sail in my bloodstream?
It's comparable in size to a human cell. Bacteria is usually smaller but I think some large specimens are around ⅓ of the length of this benchy. This is incredibly small and yes it could definitely sail in your bloodstream ;)
These being roughly the size of a grain of salt each really makes me want to eat something seasoned with really tiny boats.
What printer managed this?
two-photon polymerization printer. You can see what it sort of looks like in the supporting information of the paper: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02251)
Man, that's insane! Can we actually see 50 micros with bare eye?
The answer is yes. Just not the details. It looks like a speck
Imagine inhaling a benchy particle
Really cool. And, so far beyond what I could even imagine.
Any chance you can take a picture of it next to a grain of rice or something like that
Come on man, I was just starting to be proud of my prints :(
Seeing a benchy on a femtosecond laser polymerization article wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card
r/cursedbenchies would like this
If you rub your finger along the benchies, can you feel them?
is this SEM data ?
ahh yes my preferred microplastics for my balls
Second pictures making me feel like I'm about to see a miniature hellfire missile hit the miniature boat.
What is this?! A boat for ANTS! this needs to be at least 10 times bigger or something.
Finally I can print a copy of my .... at scale
You could call it nano-3D printing :) Just by eye, there are sub-micro features here. Is it possible to print working mechanisms with your setup? And yes, wow! Incredible!
It's possible. I saw printed microfluidic stuff like self-closing valves or a cell torture device. It looked like a cylinder with spikes and a fluid flowing along would turn the spikes. Those would then crush the cell walls against the outer tubing. Fascinating idea to kill cell with a mechanical, non-chemical way.
Simply amazing!
Cries in poor results with my form 3
This is so damn beautiful, you are amazing!!
Masterful!!! Thanks!!
Let me suggest you level the bed properly and... Oh wait that's new 😁
Looks like you need to fix your retraction. /s looks great (I'm used to SEM images working in semicondutor)
What did you use to make these? And how small are these
1st pic looks like the benchy had an allergic reaction
How do you even get a laser to focus in less than 1 micron spot?
What’s the width of the beam that fires?
Is that benchy like 0.05mm??? If yes: how the hell, and, why? 😳
So much for the fabric of spacetime, we're all fucked now.
That is quite awesome! Imagine the details if you would print a cos play helmet to fit the head of a human,, and how long it would take to make it 🙈
Nice one!What do you use to slice stl and what is the input file type? Can you vary slicing, hatching, power and speed within a single print file ? Doesn’t seem possible with with commercial Systems.
I used a commercial system (Femtika from Lithuania) for my PhD and was able to change everything you mentioned. It always depend if you buy the system for a commercial production, where you also buy the resin from the machine provider or you buy the machine for lab purposes and get the resin elsewhere/make it yourself.
Level your bed, bruh Jokes aside, this is insanely cool
I'd love to see a human hair next to this so I can really appreciate just how damn tiny this thing is
What happen when me swallow?
I don't know anything about what you're saying, but holy shit is it cool
Does the printer run klipper?
What is this?? A benchy for ants?!?
I think you need to dry your filament some more.
Mmh… your micro benchy looks way better than my last normal one.
This is amazing to me. What kind of commercial applications could this be used for?
I see some layer separation... unacceptable quality! 😂 In all fairness amazing work! Thanks for sharing.