MIT’s 3D Printer Can Produce Complete and Functional Electric Motors

3D printers are not Star Trek-style replicators. Most 3D printers can only fabricate parts in a single material and that material is usually some form of plastic. But multi-material 3D printers do exist and by taking that idea to its limits, a team of researchers at MIT was able to build this 3D printer that can produce complete and functional electric motors.

The team didn’t have to start from scratch, because they were able to use an E3D ToolChanger 3D printer as the foundation for this project. That printer model came out several years ago and is now discontinued, but it was and still is pretty unique. It can swap between toolheads on-the-fly to print with different materials, which is a capability most users take advantage of to print with multiple colors or multiple kinds of thermoplastic filament material, such as PLA and PETG.

In this case, however, the MIT team developed their own custom toolheads that dramatically expanded the available materials. Two of the four toolheads are conventional and used for standard PLA+ and flexible TPU. The third toolhead accepts pellets rather than filament and the researchers used that for either hard or soft magnets, as they could mix specific ratios of pellets to achieve the desired results. The fourth toolhead uses a syringe for extrusion, so it can print a special electrically conductive silver ink.

Put those altogether and you have: dielectric material, conductive material, magnetic material (hard and soft), and flexible material, all on-demand. That is everything you need to 3D-print a wide range of functional electric components.

The most impressive demonstration presented by the researchers in their paper is a linear electric motor. It is a flexible spring, hard magnets, a rigid substrate, and conductive traces forming a coil — all 3D-printed. When power is applied to the traces, the motor runs.

The potential for printing electric components is immense, as it would circumvent the traditional supply and manufacturing chain, letting users get custom components within hours.