MIT's 3D printer spits out a working electric motor in three hours for 50 cents
3D-printing platform rapidly produces complex electric machines
MIT researchers have built a multimaterial 3D-printing platform that fully prints electric machines in a single step. Using four extruders to handle conductive inks, magnetic materials, and more, they produced a working linear motor in about three hours with just one post-processing step. The motor matched or outperformed conventionally made versions, and material costs came to roughly 50 cents per device.
We have an opportunity to fundamentally change the way things are made by making hardware onsite in one step, rather than relying on a global supply chain.
- delichon
Twenty first century military supremacy may go to whoever can produce the most best drone printers. Meaning whoever can produce the most best drone printer printers.
- alexpotato
Highly recommend people read the story Autofac by Philip K. Dick [0]
Slight spoiler:
It's a bit "paperclip maximizer" and a bit "grey goo"
- EA-3167
The actual paper is so much easier to read and much more informative: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17452759.2026.2...
In fact I was skeptical based on the article, but blown away by the paper.
- peter_d_sherman
>"They designed their system to process multiple functional materials, including electrically conductive materials and magnetic materials, using four extrusion tools that can handle varied forms of printable material. [...]
The researchers used this system to produce a fully 3D-printed electric linear motor in a matter of hours using five materials."
This is highly interesting!
That is, being able to 3D print things (such as a motor) with electric and magnetic parts...
Circuit printing 3D printers have been around for quite awhile now, but printed magnetic parts of a 3D printed object? That I'm hearing for the first time here!
(It would be interesting (in the future) if one could have a 3D printer that could print with any metal, and if such metals at different micro-thin layers could somehow be combined with one another to make ad-hoc printed metal alloy layers... Well, we do have "metal sputtering" aka "vapor deposition" -- but that requires a vacuum tube, argon gas, and a plasma chamber... but maybe someone in the future will discover some way (electrically, I'm guessing -- an ionic wind of some sort?) to print ad-hoc thin layers of metal alloys at room temperature and in the presence of air by mixing pure elemental metals...)
Anyway, congratulations to the team at MIT for the considerable step forward in 3D printing!
- NegativeLatency
Any video or pictures of the motor itself?