This Amazing 3D Printer Can Deposit Multiple Materials at Once Using a Handful of Nozzles

Most 3D printers today can only work with a single material at a time, but there are plenty of models on the market that can print multiple materials. The most common way to do that is with a separate extruder and hot end for each material. It’s also possible to splice different materials together during printing in order to extrude through a single hot end, which is how the Prusa Multi-Material Upgrade (MMU) and the Mosaic Palette 2 work. This unique 3D printer works in a similar way, but with liquid materials that offer a number of advantages.

The problem with both the MMU (and the MMU2/MMU2S) and Palette 2 is that all of the materials you print need to have similar properties—particularly the hot end temperature required to liquefy the plastic. That means they’re most useful for printing different colors of the same material type. The MMU has the additional disadvantages of being slow to switch filaments and requiring a purge tower. This innovative 3D printer, which was designed at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, solves all of those problems by pumping liquid materials through channels in a special nozzle setup.

This extrusion process relies entirely on precise fluid dynamics calculations. As long as those calculations are accurate, the printer can switch back and forth between materials instantly. In testing, they have been able to switch between as many as eight different materials in a single print job. As a bonus, multiple nozzles can be fed from the output, which means patterns of parts or features with consistent spacing can all be printed simultaneously. This works at very high resolutions, impressive speeds, and with multiple materials. Those include wax, silicone, and gelatin. In the future, it may be possible to use even more complex channel systems to send different materials to individual nozzles at the same time.