Regular 3D printing requires a cumbersome, pricey machine, but what if you could potentially match that technological innovation with your pocket? Researchers have harnessed a familiar instrument—the pen—to make a very first-of-its-kind course of action that transforms flat ink drawings into 3D objects in the event the drawings are dipped into a Unique Answer. The advance could develop anything from furnishings to solar panels with the ease of 2nd printing.

“This work is quite stylish,” says Michael Dickey, a chemical engineer at North Carolina Condition University who wasn't involved with The brand new research. “You can attract anything in second, ship it, after which you can renovate it into 3D, and having the ability to use a pen to try this is just quite neat.”

To create the progress, Sumin Lee and Web optimization Woo Tune, bioengineers at Seoul National University, and colleagues begun using a pen that looks like a dry-erase marker. They loaded the best3dpenguide.com put into practice with amongst two inks. A person, colored crimson during the online video previously mentioned, contained a compound called a surfactant, which makes the ink a lot less adhesive. The opposite, colored black, has no surfactant. This ink “anchors” the drawing on the surface area it truly is drawn on—In this instance, a rock—to help stabilize the pink ink because it transforms into its 3D condition.