3d-Printed Hair by MIT Research Group

Introduction

3D printing has been explored to produce a wide range of varieties of things in recent years, including cars, buildings, edible food and human skin. However, some things like hair, which consists of dense arrays of extremely fine feathers have always been a difficulty. The impracticality of direct print fine hair arrays on object's surfaces is due to the lack of an efficient digital representation of CAD models with dine surface texture(N. Hopkinson,2006).

Process

Researchers in MIT’s Tangible Media group have found a way to bypass a major design step in 3-D printing, to quickly and efficiently model and print thousands of hair-like structures. Instead of using CAD to draw thousands of individual hairs on a computer, the team built a new software platform, called “Cilllia,” that users directly generate printing layers that contain hair structure information for the 3D printer. "It also lets users define the angle, thickness, density, and height of thousands of hairs,with the precision of 50 um, in just a few minutes." (Chu, 2016))

Application

hair is actually a remarkably versatile material that can be used for a surprising number of applications. Cilllia’s 3D printed hair structures and surfaces can be used to produce everything from hairy jewelry, customized paint brushes, gearless motors, movable surfaces, adhesive surfaces and even next generation tactile surfaces.

“The ability to fabricate customized hair-like structures not only expands the library of 3-D-printable shapes but also enables us to design alternative actuators and sensors,”(Qu et al., 2016) the authors conclude in their paper. “3-D-printed hair can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.”

Analysis

This innovation project completely changed my understanding of 3d-prinitng. As I remember, products printed by the layered by layered method are usually hard and static. However, 3D printers now turn into producing things that are extremely tactile and organic, which only happened in nature before. It did not only print objects but also provided sensitive experiences.

The idea of rethinking the 3-D printing process itself and the purpose of 3-D printed objects is also very inspiring. It well demonstrates that the importance of not relying on machine, but fully understand and question it, hence developed better machine for more possibilities. We could question what other constraints of machines could be potentially challenged.

Reference

Chu, J. (2016). Need hair? Press “print”. [online] MIT News. Available at: http://news.mit.edu/2016/3-d-print-hair-0617 [Accessed 15 Dec. 2016].

N. Hopkinson, R.J.M. Hague, P.M. Dickens. Rapid Manufacturing, An Industrial Revolution For The Digital Age. Chichester, Wiley Publication, 2006, pp. 43–45.

Qu, J., Dublon, G., Cheng, C., Heibeck, F., Willis, K. and Ishii, H. (2016). Cilllia - 3D Printed Micro-Pillar Structures for Surface Texture, Actuation and Sensing. [online] pp.8-10. Available at: http://tmg-trackr.media.mit.edu/publishedmedia/Papers/607-Cilllia%20%203D%20Printed%20Micro/Published/PDF [Accessed 2 Dec. 2016].