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A Multimaterial Multinozzle 3D Printer

This thing was quietly invented and rolled out last November. A collaboration between the Wyss Institute and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has yielded a new digital fabrication technique called MM3D, or Multimaterial Multinozzle 3D printing.

“When printing an object using a conventional extrusion-based 3D printer, the time required to print it scales cubically with the length of the object, because the printing nozzle has to move in three dimensions rather than just one,” said co-first author Mark Skylar-Scott, a Research Associate at the Wyss Institute. “MM3D’s combination of multinozzle arrays with the ability to switch between multiple inks rapidly effectively eliminates the time lost to switching printheads and helps get the scaling law down from cubic to linear, so you can print multimaterial, periodic 3D objects much more quickly.”

Check out some of these MM3D tricks:

You can learn more about the technology here.