Brief mention of Reprap on The Space Show 934

There is an interesting podcast on the future of space exploration in which Reprap is briefly mentioned in the context of how fast we're moving forward with molecular manufacturing (at around 56-57 minutes) on the 27th of April 2008.

Homepage - [thespaceshow.com]
Mp3 download (40MB 1hr 30min) - [archived.thespaceshow.com]

Molecular manufacturing has one problem, it takes a long time. The higher the resolution usually the slower the printing. Reprap takes hours to print something, just imagine how long it takes to print a part with single atom resolution.

Many of these single atom printers of the future would have millions of 'print heads' just for that reason, so I think that print time will be about the same.

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Jay

... maybe someone knows the "Millipede"-device, developed in the 90-th by one of the inventors of the PZT-actuators?

It's a frame equipped with some hundreds to some thousands microscopic triangles, each with a tip which could be heated and a PZT-bending-sensor.

This frame rests over a plane surface of some thermoplastic polymer in the size of maybe a square-centimeter and can be moved with two XY-piezo-actuators with an accuracy of some nanometers in an overall range of some microns.

With nanoprecise moving the tips over the surface and heating the tip this device can impress cavities into the polymer in the size of 20 nanometers.

With encircling the cavities and smooth reheating this cavities can be filled/repaired again.

This should be a cheap 'next-generation'-memory-device, capable of many terrabytes storage in a chip-card - a so-called 'lifetime-memory'.

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Now imagine this sort of multiframe (maybe much bigger, maybe in molecular dimensions too) equipped with fabbing heads - ink-jet, FDM or other.

This trick should overcome some of the time-problems (and others), when dealing with high accuracies and ultra-small fabbing-dots - maybe with multi-material-fabbing too ...

Viktor

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2008 03:11PM by Viktor.

The real question is, how do you make atom scale support material?

Insert Hydrogen. Thats easy enough and it can float away when done. (IDK if thats actually true, but what I mean by it is just place a repelling force) Also, I figure that the intermolecular forces strengths are stronger than gravity, because that is what physics says and I agree with physics.

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Jay

So these molecular manufacturers work at cold temperatures right?