Father and son harness magnetic fields for new type of 3-D printing
Published March 17, 2017 This content is archived.
An article on Science News for Students reports on Vader Systems, a company founded by father-and-son entrepreneurs Scott and Zack Vader, who have designed and are manufacturing a liquid metal printer, with an assist from Chi Zhou, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering.
A light emitting diode, or LED, sits to one side below the printer’s nozzle. A receiver sits on the other side. A computer constantly checks how much light reaches the receiver. As a droplet falls, it blocks some of that light. “According to the energy change, we know the behavior of the droplet,” Zhou says. If a droplet isn’t right, it will block too much or too little of that energy. And if that happens, the computer signals that something is wrong and shuts off the printer.
