We’ve said that before, but we take a careful look at whatever provocative claims come our way. The claim of “the world’s fastest” or “the world’s first” always seems to be quickly hidden, but while the claim of “the world’s smallest bench” is supported by two dozen tugboats E. coli To have a hard time finding space, we’re very comfortable with it.
Of course, the obscure benchmark was not only printed for that, but as part of demonstrating what is possible with “microswimmers”, artificial particles that are designed to move freely under a microscopic regime. Described in a paper by [Rachel P. Doherty] Et al From the Soft Matter Physics Lab at Leiden University, the construction of microswimmers sized in the order of 10 to 20 μm can be repeated, and a small field of platinum catalysts can be inserted. The catalyst is the engine of the microswimmer; In the environment hydrogen peroxide decomposes on the catalytic surface and provides a strong force.
Synthetic microswimmers have been around for a while, but most are made by chemical or evaporation methods resulting in simple shapes such as rods and spheres. The current work describes very complex shapes – the bench was a little flex, as the more useful microswimmers were simple helicois, which essentially screw themselves into the surrounding fluid. The printing method was based on two-photon polymerization (2PP), a non-linear optical process, which polymerizes the resin when two photons are absorbed simultaneously.
The idea of having such a small powered machine ready and manufactured is great. We would like to see how microfluidics, perhaps, control methods can be added to prints.
