Research
New techniques, materials, and innovations pushing additive manufacturing forward.
The Oxygen Window That Made Resin Printing Continuous
How a precisely engineered 'dead zone' of still-liquid resin, held open by a thin film of oxygen, let one printing process trade stop-and-go curing for one unbroken pull.
Why 3D Printers Are Finally Learning to Curve
For three decades, 3D printers have built objects in flat horizontal layers, turning sloped surfaces into tiny staircases. New slicing math from 2025 is finally making curved, non-planar layers fast enough to use.
How Cell Size Shapes Bioprinting Resolution
Extrusion bioprinting's resolution and the shear stress it puts on cells rise and fall together, because both trace back to forcing bioink through a nozzle wall. Light-based printing sidesteps the nozzle entirely, but the cell's own 10-20 micron diameter sets the finest scale either method can resolve.
The Printer That Blends Materials Like Paint
A PolyJet printer does not commit to one plastic and stay there. It jets multiple photopolymer resins droplet by droplet under UV light, so a single part can shift from rubber-soft to hard as it prints, the way a paint mixer blends two cans into every shade in between.
How Dry Is Dry Enough for FDM Filament
The chemistry behind filament moisture absorption, and why the popular one-time drying fix holds up far better for some materials than others.
Why Jet Fusion Powder Doesn't Wear Out
Multi Jet Fusion reuses up to 80 percent of its nylon powder every build, and the chemistry explains why the parts rarely seem to notice.
How Electron Beam Melting Prints Titanium Stress-Free
Electron beam melting holds the entire powder bed near 700°C, erasing the thermal gradient that leaves laser-printed metal parts residually stressed, but the mechanism it trades that problem for shows up just as clearly once the fatigue data comes in.
How PEEK's Crystallinity Determines a Successful Print
PEEK is semicrystalline, and getting a strong print comes down to managing that chemistry deliberately: the chamber temperature it needs, the cooling rate that lets it crystallize, and the mechanical properties that follow from getting both right.
How 4D Printing Teaches Polymers to Change Shape
A shape memory polymer can be printed flat, folded into a shape that has no business holding still, and left alone until heat or light tells it to unfold into the part it was actually designed to be.
Solving Ceramic Printing's Slowest Step
Thermal debinding has kept 3D-printed ceramic parts on a 20-to-100-hour timeline for years, because burning off resin too fast cracks the part. A new vacuum-and-graphite-felt process from UT Dallas cuts that to under 30 minutes.
How Metal Bonds Without Ever Melting
Cold spray fires metal powder fast enough to fuse on impact alone, letting shops rebuild titanium and aluminum aircraft parts without a heat-affected zone, but proving that impact actually produced a sound bond is still the harder half of the problem.
The Chemistry That Finishes a Resin Print
A part fresh off an SLA or DLP printer is only 50 to 85 percent polymerized. What post-cure actually does, chemically, to close that gap, and why time alone is the wrong variable to control it with.
Photopolymer Resins Built to Be Undone
Stereolithography and DLP resins have always cured into permanent, unrecyclable networks. A decade of work on dynamic covalent chemistry is quietly rewriting that assumption, one reversible bond at a time.
Why Your Printer Moves the Way It Does
The frame geometry that carries a printer's nozzle around the build plate, not the nozzle itself, decides how fast it can print cleanly, and software can only compensate for so much of what geometry gets wrong.
The Orientation Decision Nobody Optimizes
Rotating a part before it prints can more than double its ductility, multiply interfacial bond strength between dissimilar materials nearly fourfold, and decide whether a surface needs sanding, yet most slicing software still leaves the choice to whatever angle the model happened to load in.