LeviPrint Offers Contactless Fabrication by Levitating Materials Into Place

A team of researchers from the UpnaLab and Smart Cities Institute divisions of the Public University of Navarre, UltraLeap, and the University of São Paulo have come up with a contactless way to fabricate physical three-dimensional objects — using ultrasonic levitation.

"We have designed a levitator combined with a robotic arm and a liquid dispenser to manufacture complex objects without contact," lead researcher Asier Marzo explains of the team's work — which, unlike traditional 3D printing, doesn't require any contact with the material itself.

That's a neat enough trick in and of itself, but it brings with it a number of real-world advantages. "We can manipulate small, brittle parts, as well as liquids or powders, thus making the processes more versatile," explains lead author Iñigo Ezcurdia. "There is less cross-contamination, as the manipulator does not touch the material.

"Furthermore, it enables manufacturing techniques that cannot be achieved using traditional 3D printing, such as adding elements on top of existing parts or manufacturing inside closed containers from the outside."

The system works through ultrasonic levitation, building on earlier methods of levitating small particles and droplets through carefully-tuned vibrations — effectively the same technology driving gadgets like this acoustic levitation wand or the Flappy Bird-inspired Levi-loop game , which Ultraleap had previously worked on.

Where the team's project extends the state of the art is in trapping the levitated particles in position and in a selected orientation, allowing for contactless manufacturing of surprisingly complex parts.

In addition to reducing contamination, the ability to place materials using ultrasonic levitation unlocks other possibilities. In one experiment, the team constructed a ship in a bottle by levitating the materials needed through the narrow neck — and have discussed the potential for modifying the system to work in liquids, rather than air, in order to build objects directly inside the tissues of living beings.

The team's work is to be presented at SIGGRAPH '22 this August, with a preprint available as a downloadable PDF from the Public University of Navarre.