Stanford Engineers Have 3D Printed Tens of Thousands of Hard-to-Manufacture Nanoparticles

Stanford material engineers have utilized 3D printing to create tens of thousands of hard-to-manufacture nanoparticles, that are expected to lead to the development of new materials capable of instantly altering their form.

In nanomaterials, shape is destiny. That is, the geometry of the particle in the material defines the physical characteristics of the resulting material.

“A crystal made of nano-ball bearings will arrange themselves differently than a crystal made of nano-dice and these arrangements will produce very different physical properties,” said Wendy Gu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, introducing her latest paper which appears in the journal Nature Communications. “We’ve used a 3D nanoprinting technique to produce one of the most promising shapes known – Archimedean truncated tetrahedrons. They are micron-scale tetrahedrons with the tips lopped off.”