Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology have 3D printed the world’s smallest wine glass – barely visible to the naked eye – with a rim smaller than the width of a human hair. But the idea wasn’t to serve extremely light drinkers. Rather, the glass was printed to provide a new, simplified technique for making a range of applications from telecommunications to robotics.
The method could produce lenses for medical devices, microrobots and components for fiber-optic networks. As an example, researchers printed a fiber-optic filter on an optical fiber.
“The backbone of the internet is based on optical fibers made of glass. In those systems, all kinds of filters and couplers are needed that can now be 3D printed by our technique,” says co-autho r Kristinn Gylfason, an associate professor of Micro- and Nanosystems at KTH. “This opens many new possibilities.”
The method drastically reduces the energy needed to 3D print silica glass, which normally requires heating materials up to several hundred degrees for hours, says the study’s lead author, Po-Han Huang, a doctoral student at KTH.
“The advantage of our method is there’s no need for thermal treatment and the glass can withstand extreme heat in applications.”
Since thermal treatment is no longer required, the technology can be used in a variety of application scenarios, he says.
“The concerns when integrating 3D printing methods are usually different for different applications. Even though optimization of our method is still required for different applications, we believe our method presents an important and necessary breakthrough for 3D glass printing to be used in practical scenarios.”
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