No more than four times the size of a human hair, a small racing car has been developed within minutes, all thanks to a 3D printing technique by a team from Vienna University, which is led by Jan Torgersen. The printer can build, what are known as nanostructures, within 5m/s  -this is a new world record for this sort of technology, though nothing like what’s used in ink and laser cartridge technology.

The tiny object, which has a fully functional steering mechanism is created by the printer , which shoots out resin which is hardened by a laser beam in a precise manner on exact spots of the product. The mirrors around the item move constantly to make sure everything falls into place and the little item is produced in super fast time.

The resin used is as important as the process of moving the lasers and the team, which is led by Robert Liska, incorporated the use of light sensitive molecules when they produced the resin and the materials on offer. Areas in the resin will harden when they hit light and solidify. The top layer can then be manipulated with lasers near instantaneously.

The technology has been used to create medical scaffolds thus far. This has been used for operations and engineering biological tissue, it can also be seeded with wave guides for electronic devices that manipulate the path of light. In time it is expected that highly detailed levels of little items will be created, which will of course expand the number of uses that can be created by the laser and the 3D printing technique. The main bottleneck of this technique is the fabrication time for larger objects which we can now probably overcome with our unique writing speed,” says Torgersen.

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