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37 analyses tagged Materials Science
3D Printing

Prusa HT Hotend: 400°C Turns the Core One Into a PPS-CF Printer

Prusa's $199 HT Hotend takes every Core One to 400°C for PPS, PPA, and carbon-fiber nylon. What it unlocks for 3D printing, what it can't, and who should buy.

3D Printing

Virginia Tech's Self-Repairing Liquid Metal Composite Can Be 3D Printed Into Circuits That Heal Themselves

Virginia Tech's gallium-indium composite restores conductivity after being cut and can be 3D printed into self-healing circuits. How it bridges breaks.

3D Printing

Formnext Shenzhen 2026: What the Conference Reveals About 3D Printing's New Markets

At Formnext Asia Shenzhen 2026, the most important signals weren't machine announcements. AI modeling companies, server cooling vendors, and smartphone production parts tell a different story.

3D Printing

3devo's Filament Maker X10: Desktop Filament Production at 36 Kilos Per Day

The 3devo FMX10 brings precision filament extrusion to universities, research labs, and 3D printing farms — with ±30µm diameter tolerance and PEEK-level temperature range.

3D Printing

Has FDM 3D Printing Hit Its Peak? What the Plateau Actually Means

Hackaday examines whether consumer FDM has reached its mechanical limits — and why a technology plateau looks different from a technology ceiling.

3D Printing

Acmer SM 60W MOPA Split Laser Review: Industrial Speed, Industrial Caveats

The $6,299 Acmer SM 60W MOPA fiber laser marks metal at 10,000mm/s, but ships with no enclosure, fume extraction, or easy software.

3D Printing

MeltCalc: A Polymer Chemist Built the Hot End + Material Database FDM Printers Always Needed

Robert Samples built MeltCalc to replace manufacturer flow rate claims with thermodynamic modeling. 64 hot ends, 36 polymers, open source. Here's why realistic specs change how you set up your printer.

3D Printing

Kupros Cu29 V2: Desktop FDM Printers Are About to Print Electronics

Indiana startup Kupros has developed a patent-pending process for embedding conductive copper pathways, sensors, and antennas directly into standard FDM prints — no secondary manufacturing step.

3D Printing

Desktop Filament Market 2026, Part 3: When 'Premium' Is Just the Old Normal

The third installment of the filament market series exposes the 'Special Hamburger Meat' problem — reformulated filaments sold at premium prices for hardware-induced compatibility issues that should never have existed.

3D Printing

3D Printing a Working Airless Tire: What the Build Reveals About TPU's Limits

YouTube creator Berm Peak 3D-printed a functional TPU airless tire for mountain biking. It held up — but the experiment reveals as much about where additive manufacturing falls short as where it succeeds.

3D Printing

Lyten's Graphene Filament Powers Modovolo's 3D Printing Platform

Lyten's PA1205 graphene filament claims 2x the tensile strength of standard carbon-fiber PA12 — now default on Modovolo's US-built aerospace 3D printer.

3D Printing

Polymaker HT-PLA Pro: A Heat-Resistant PLA That Skips the Enclosure

Polymaker's HT-PLA Pro doubles impact strength over standard HT-PLA and hits a 107.6°C HDT after annealing, without requiring an enclosure or hardened nozzle.

3D Printing

AI Research Missed the Biggest TPU Innovation in the Filament Market

3DPrint.com's filament report shows AI research tools confidently missing the market's actual leaders — a warning for anyone using AI for competitive research.

3D Printing

The Multi-Color Printing Trick That Skips the Tool Changes

A layer-rotation technique for multi-color 3D printing produces smoother gradients with far fewer tool changes than traditional methods — at the cost of thicker apparent layer lines.

3D Printing

Prusament PA11: The Filament That Doesn't Care Which Way You Print It

Prusament's new PA11 Natural nylon posts the highest anisotropy resistance of any Prusa material — meaning gears and moving parts hold up no matter which axis they're printed on.

3D Printing

Hembased's Palm Leaf Filament Composts at Home — But Is It Truly Sustainable?

Hembased's new PHA filament made from palm leaf waste degrades in under a year at room temperature — unlike PLA's industrial-only composting. The sustainability math is more complicated than it looks.

3D Printing

Palm Leaves, Cold Compost: Hembased Brings Sustainable Filament to FDM

Hembased converts palm leaf waste into cold-compostable filament that degrades at 20–30°C within a year. Here's what the material actually delivers — and the context it's entering.

3D Printing

UCLA 3D Printed a Zinc-Ion Battery That Stores 7x More Energy — With a $300 Consumer Resin Printer

UCLA researchers used an Elegoo Mars 3 Pro to build a zinc-ion battery storing more than 7x the energy of comparable designs. Here's how 3D printing enabled the breakthrough and what it signals for grid storage.

3D Printing

3D-Printed Lithium Battery: Caltech's Cobalt-Free Cathode Redesign

Caltech researchers used 3D printing to rethink lithium-ion cathode geometry — eliminating cobalt and enabling faster ion pathways without requiring new battery chemistry.

3D Printing

OpenCAL Brings Layerless Volumetric 3D Printing to DIY Makers

OpenCAL is an open-source computed axial lithography build that prints inch-scale objects in about 3 minutes — no layer lines, no support structures, made from off-the-shelf parts.

3D Printing

What to Do With Opened Filament Rolls: A Practical Storage Guide for Bambu Printers

Moisture is the main enemy of filament shelf life. Here's how Bambu Lab users actually store partially used rolls to maintain print quality — from dry boxes to AMS integration strategies.

3D Printing

Zellerfeld Partners With Volumental to Bring Precision Foot Scanning to 3D Printed Shoes

Zellerfeld's investment in Volumental integrates 66 million foot scans' worth of fitting data directly into its 3D printing pipeline — addressing the precision gap that has limited custom footwear at scale.

3D Printing

Prusament PLA High Speed: Up to 40% Faster Print Times for Rapid Prototyping

Prusa's new PLA High Speed filament hits 28 mm³/s volumetric flow and a tensile anisotropy coefficient of 0.60 — making draft prints faster and stronger without sacrificing surface finish.

3D Printing

Bambu PLA Pure: 3D Printing Filament Built for Homes, Not Workshops

Bambu Lab's new PLA Pure prioritizes safety certifications and ingredient transparency over performance metrics — a deliberate shift as desktop 3D printers move from hobbyist workshops into family homes.

3D Printing

How Pogačar and Fairlight Cycles Are Using 3D Printing for Bike Components

Professional cyclists and boutique framebuilders are using material extrusion 3D printing for cable guides, cockpit holders, and wiring housings — small custom components where the technology's economics and precision make the most sense.

3D Printing

AI and a Hybrid 3D Printer Just Built Functional Blood Vessel Networks in a Lab

Researchers at Notre Dame and Harvard Medical School used Bayesian optimization and a hybrid extrusion/aerosol printer to build vascularized tissue scaffolds with channels as small as 5-6 microns. Endothelial cells attached, formed linings, and fluid flowed through.

3D Printing

DIY Ceramic Circuit Boards: 3D-Printed Stamps and Clay Replace Chemical Baths

A maker process using 3D-printed stamps, copper powder, and kiln firing creates ceramic circuit boards without PCB chemicals. It's solarpunk electronics manufacturing at bench scale.

3D Printing

UT Researchers Used 3D Printing to Build a Tabletop Version of a $400 Million Semiconductor Machine

University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed a volumetric 3D printing approach that creates nanostructures simultaneously rather than sequentially — a tabletop alternative to EUV lithography machines that cost $400 million and are made by a single manufacturer.

3D Printing

Prusament's New Resin Is Safer and Faster — With One Catch

Prusament Resin Model+ removes Bisphenol A, TPO, and ACMO from the formula and cuts layer exposure to 2–2.6 seconds. The higher viscosity creates a workflow tradeoff worth understanding before you order.

3D Printing

Soiboi Soft: How Bambu Lab Desktop Printers Are Enabling Soft Robotics and Microfluidics

Soiboi Soft builds untethered soft robots and microfluidic clocks using Bambu Lab desktop printers. Specific settings and techniques for the maker workflow.

3D Printing

Cyclops POV: The 3D Printed Rig Bringing Studio POV to Independent Film

3D People's PA12 nylon approach solved the iterative design problem that made professional POV camera rigs prohibitively expensive to customize for independent filmmakers.

3D Printing

SHAPE as Medicine: How 3D-Printed Cell Geometry Could Become a Therapeutic Tool

University of Nottingham researchers are using two-photon polymerization to print microscale scaffolds that control cell shape — with early evidence that geometry alone can direct how cells grow, migrate, and potentially heal.

3D Printing

Microwave 3D Printing: Rice Researchers Hit Human-Hair Resolution on Functional Electronics

Rice University's near-field microwave printing technique focuses energy into a zone as narrow as a human hair — enabling flexible electronics, ingestible sensors, and soft biomedical devices without cleanroom fabrication.

3D Printing

Nike Air Works: 3D Printed Air Max Designed by 8 Global Creators

Nike's Air Works R&D program invites 8 designers to Oregon to create limited 3D printed Air Max styles with Zellerfeld — launching by Air Max Day 2027. Here's what the initiative signals about additive footwear.

3D Printing

3D Printing's Metal Problem: The First Steel Alloy Designed by AI From Scratch

Most metals used in additive manufacturing were designed for casting and forging decades ago. Researchers at Purdue and South China university used machine learning to design one that wasn't.

3D Printing

HP IF 600HT: Open Materials Take On Stratasys in Industrial FDM

HP's IF 600HT debuts at AMUG 2026 — open 1.75mm filament, 500°C extruder, PEEK-class materials, priced directly against Stratasys F370/F450 with lower TCO.

3D Printing

Aconity3D WireDED: Three Metals, One Build, No Machine Changes

Aconity3D's AconityWIRE system processes aluminum, stainless steel, Inconel, and titanium wire in a single build — without reconfiguring the machine. What this means for industrial metal AM.

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