Discovery of a new Printing Technology Making use of Sound Waves

Engineers from the University of Harvard have come out with a new printing technology that makes use of sound waves. This is a great revolution in printing where the sound waves control the droplet flow of highly viscous liquids. In other words, the new printing Technology involves a printer which uses sound to print with the help of tiny droplets of highly viscous liquids.

The new printing technology will help in the manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and bioprinting. Here they use biopolymer and cell-laden solutions which are 100 times denser than water.

According to Jennifer Lewis, a senior author and professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the new printing technology that they have created helps printing in a drop-on-demand manner.

In the new Printing Technology, how the liquid can be manipulated with the help of sound waves: 

We see in Inkjet printing which patterns liquid droplets, the liquids are about 10 times more viscous than water. The researchers are far more interested in liquids that are more viscous. In the case of biopharmaceuticals and bioprinting, biopolymer and cell-laden solutions are about 100 times more viscous than water. There are some sugar-based biopolymers which have the same viscosity as honey which is about 25,000 times more viscous than water. Viscosity of fluids is influenced by temperature and composition changes. With the result, controlling the droplet size becomes difficult and hence it is not possible to optimize the printing parameters.

The researchers therefore wanted to develop a new printing technology independent of the viscosity of the fluid. They thus turned their attention to using sound waves. When we consider a liquid under gravitational force, the droplet size is large and the flow of the droplet is difficult to control.

The researchers have thus turned to generating sound waves in order to enhance drop formation. Pressure waves have been used to defy the earth’s gravitational force, as is seen in Acoustic Levitation. These same sound waves are being used by the researchers to assist gravity and the new technology adopted is known as acoustophoretic printing.

The researchers have built a sub-wavelength acoustic resonator that can generate a highly confined acoustic field that can pull a force that is 100 times more than the gravitational force at the tip of the printer nozzle. In this new printing technology, the controlled force then pulls each droplet from the nozzle on attaining a specific size. It is then ejected on the area for printing. If the amplitude of the sound waves is high then the droplet size is small, irrespective of the fluid’s viscosity.

The new Printing Technology can have a wider scope: 

The new printing Technology was carried out on different materials like honey, stem-cell inks, biopolymers, optical resins and liquid metals. It was seen that the sound waves do not travel through the droplet and hence the method was safe to use even in the case of sensitive living cells or proteins. They hope that the new printing technology can help in the manufacture of new biopharmaceuticals, cosmetics and food.

How to Manage Your Print Services More Effectively

If you own or operate a small business that has been experiencing some steady growth recently, you may have noticed an increase in the amount of documents you need to have printed. While the task of printing may have seemed simple enough when your business was first starting out, increased sales combined with more customers and employees means you have more documents that need to be printed. The longer you continue to do this task yourself, the more time-consuming it will become. However, there is an easier solution. There are companies that specialize in performing the printing tasks of businesses of all sizes. Here are some of the ways a business can benefit from hiring a company that performs managed print services.

Costs will be reduced

This is the number one reason why companies start to outsource their various printing tasks. When a business is just starting to build up a customer base and make a name for itself, money is usually very tight. It is at this critical stage in a company's history that every decision that is made will have a huge impact on whether the company succeeds or fails. Therefore, the choice of dramatically cutting costs by outsourcing the company's printing assignments seems like an obvious one. The amount of money that a business can save will depend on which company it chooses to perform their printing. Many companies offer bulk discounts, so the more items you have printed, the more money your company can save.

Less chance of a data breach

Nowadays, corporate security is a greater concern for businesses of all sizes than it has ever been before. Every day, there seems to be a new story about a company's sensitive information being compromised. If you print statements by yourself, the sensitive information of your employees or clients may fall into the wrong hands if you do not have the proper security protocols in place. However, companies that specialize in print outsourcing will have facilities that are guarded around the clock, with all employees being thoroughly searched before they leave the premises. This helps to prevent your data from being stolen and ending up being used by international hackers, competing companies or anyone else. This is peace of mind that you can not put a price on.

No need to buy expensive equipment

Printing equipment, especially machines that are on the high end, tend to be very expensive. This is not even considering the enormous amount of money it costs to maintain and repair this equipment when it inevitably breaks down. By outsourcing your printing, you can not only avoid the high price of printing equipment, you do not need to have your office space taken up by bulky printing machines.

3D LED Printer Makes a Contact Lens Display Possible

3D Printed Contact Lenses 

According to researchers, 3D printed contact lenses can now be used like Google Glass or head up display showing the wearers’ data as well as monitor their health. 3D printer build up metallic or polymer material to form objects when instructed by computer code that conveys to the machine the desired dimension together with the appearance of the product, though this machine is more complex.

Researchers have started constructing prototypes for contact lens displays, and their biggest impediment was parts of fabrication which on a theoretical level is not difficult to build display in a contact lens but building and placing the tiny interrelated parts on a tiny polymer disk is a difficult task.

The 3D LED printer is a 3D quantum dot LED printer which on breaking the concept of an LED to its most basic form, researchers envisaged that they need not think of LEDs like small plastic light bulbs but stacks of interacting substance.

The printer on its part could lay down an LED with a sandwich type of a structure which is not unlike a single pixel in a display of OLED and get emissive layer which is nanoparticles of cadmium selenide that is referred to as quantum dots.

Active Approach

The quantum dots or nano sized crystals of certain substance exhibit unique or particular useful electronic properties. These are sandwiched between one layer which can donate electrons and one layer that accepts them and the entire process can be fused to a surface due to the bottom adhesive layer that is activated with the help of UV light.

Moreover, the printed LEDs are ultra-thin, almost transparent as well as flexible. The transfer of electrons through quantum dot layer causes the dots to produce photons of light and the main advantage of it is that they can be made to emit light at very specific wavelength or colours.

It means that the quantum dot screens can display more recreations of colour accurately but it would not be the first priority for contact lens display which will get static, sensible image in the user’s eye.The pixel on the other hand in a contact lens display could take one of two forms and the active approach uses individual pixel as a light source and emits photons in the eye, creating an image directly.

Passive Approach 

The passive approach on the other hand uses less power though it would be more difficult using individual pixel to bend the incoming light from the environment to portray a new picture on the retina. The issue with active approach is that it needs a good amount of power to go on and wireless power collection relies partially on physical size of the collecting antenna.

When the antenna must be physically fitted in a contact lens, it creates a hard upper limit on power supply. It is unlikely to start printing smartphone screens pixel by pixel since manufacturing in bulk would be quicker and cheaper and while doing so, things like putting LEDs in circular area of contact lens less than 2 mm, it could be helpful. The cost of the prototype print cost about $20,000 to create though there is a possibility in reduction of cost in the near future.

3D Printed Heart saved Baby’s Life

3D Printing – Life Saving Surgery

Advanced technology has given rise to improvement in the digital world which has enhanced the life style to a great extent. 3D printing or additive manufacturing – AM can be referred to various processes in printing a 3 dimensional object.

A 3D printer could be a type of industrial robot. This has also proved to be of immense help recently where surgeons used3D printed model of the infant’s unusual heart in preparation for life saving surgery.

These surgeons give credit to the 3D printing which helped them to save the life of a 2 weeks infant in need of complicated heart surgery. With the use of MRI scan data, the surgeons, at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, New York City, 3D printed a copy of the heart of the infant which was unusually structured and with holes for a surgery which would have been dangerous as well as complicating.

The 3D printed heart provided an opportunity to the surgeons in studying the organ and helped in developing a detailed surgery strategy. According to Dr Emile Bacha who performed the surgery, informed Connecticut local media that the infants’ heart had holes which was not uncommon with CHD though the chambers of the heart were also in unusual shape, like a maze.

Technique like a Road Map

This technique proved to be of immense help unlike the past instances wherein they had to stop the heart and look inside to decide what should be done. The technique helped like a road map in guiding them on and they were capable of repairing the child’s heart with a single operation.

Matthew’s Hearts of Hope had funded this project, which is a Connecticut based foundation and it is said that another 3D printed heart is in the pipeline, the details of which would be following somewhere next month. In normal situation, a surgeon views the heart for the first time when the chest is opened up, but now it is no longer the same. They now have the ability to plan the surgery much in advance on seeing a 3D Heart of an infant or a child.

3D Printing in Modern Machine

Another incident has also proved to be successful with this cutting edge medical technology where a Kentucky surgeon Erle Austin with the use of 3D printing was able to conduct the most difficult surgeries.

He had informed Maker Faire in Rome that he was using 3D printing to understand a complicated heart. Austin, like the surgeons at Morgan Stanley, had used the technology to know his approach to heart surgery at Kosair Children’s Hospital on a young child. Austin printed a copy of the heart in three parts with the use of experimental version of the Makerbot Replicator 2.

He stated that since he had an identical reconstruction he could take the front of the heart and see inside and thus make a plan on how to go about with the flow of blood and move the obstruction in the heart. The NHS is planning the use of 3D printing in modern machine while US is pioneering this high tech biomedical research and the Ministry of Defence has expressed interest in such a type of a project.

7 Steps To Creating The Perfect Brochure

In the age of online marketing, you may be wondering whether you should skip creating a brochure. We would advise against that, for a few reasons. A brochure is an effective marketing tool, in conjunction with a broader comprehensive online and offline marketing strategy. A brochure can give your customers an offline option for learning more about you and your company. Want to do it right? Use our tips, and your brochures will be flying off the shelves!
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- Focus, focus, focus. What is your company’s message? What does your company do, and what do you want to sell? Why should a customer buy from you instead of going to your competitor? Write out drafts of your core messages, and edit it down to the necessary elements.

- Know and cater to your audience. Who is the person you want to be buying your product? Who do you need to convince? Address your messaging to your ideal customer, instead of a general audience. Your customers will feel the connection that you are trying to make.

- Use headlines and subheads to break up long blocks of text. At sites like UPrinting, you have a lot of customization options. Use the tools available to make your brochure as easy to read as possible. While you do not want to dumb down your message, you also do not want to overwhelm your audience with too much information.

- Add attractive photos of your company and/or product to the brochure. In addition to breaking up the text, providing photos gives context to your message, and also adds depth. Use a service such as VistaPrint to upload your desired photos. Be sure to edit down the photos so that they align properly, and do not look too stretched out or small in the brochure.

- Choose your paper stock wisely. Online stores such as PsPrint offer different premium paper stocks, and multiple folding options. Choosing a cheap paper stock will give your brochure a similarly cheap and forgettable feel. Opt for a premium paper stock to make your brochure memorable, and to give your customers a nice, tactile object to respond to.

- Include a call-to-action. Whether it is asking your customers to come into the showroom, order something, or call the office, give them something they can easily do at the end of the brochure that relates to you and your company. If you are running a store, you can sweeten the deal by offering an exclusive deal or discount to the reader. Show off your tech prowess by including a QR code deal.

- Create an eye-catching cover that will make the recipient want to open the brochure. The front of the brochure is prime real estate, so use it wisely. Whether it is with photos, illustrations, or your logo, make sure that it is attractive, legible, and clear. Visually, it should pull the reader in, and the reader should be motivated to open the brochure to learn more about your company.

By Allison Preston. Allison is an avid shopper and an experienced writer with a passion for deals and coupons and for saving her readers money. She currently writes for leading coupon and online promo code site bluepromocode.com based in Santa Monica, California. 

Four Reasons Why New Print Technology is Making the Old School Cool Again

Digital innovations are set to kill print forever, right? The Kindle is going to spell the end for books, no-one reads magazines anymore and if you can’t find a product on a smartphone you’re unlikely to know it exists. That’s the way the doomsayers for print would have us think, anyway. In actual fact, some of the coolest digital innovations right now are all about augmenting the experience of print information. From QR codes to interactive ink, the future is starting to look a lot like the past…

QR codes
The QR code is that funny black and white thing you see printed on the sides of drinks cans and cereal packets. It’s like a bar code, only it holds more information and can be scanned with a phone camera (provided you’ve downloaded the reader software as an app). Most QR codes are used as web addresses in the real world: you take a picture of the code and your phone brings you to a site that has direct relevance to the item you just engaged with. The point being that QR codes are printed on actual things in the actual world, but are directly intended to make your experience of the digital world better. Without good old fashioned ink, where would you be?

Conductive ink
Science fiction is increasingly looking like science fact. Conductive ink can be used in any printer that will accept the cartridge – and in time that’ll be all of them – meaning it’s now possible to print electronic interfaces onto bits of paper. In other words, the book and magazine only aren’t dead, but could have a whole new lease of life as a genuinely interactive object. Kids’ books and magazines seem the most obvious candidate for the technology, which can (for instance) activate sounds when the reader touches images on the paper.

Near Field Communications
Near Field Communications are what power the contactless credit/debit card – and they can also be incorporated into print media such as posters and banners. If you’ve got a smartphone smart enough to recognised the existence of the embedded NFC chip, you’ll get taken on a digital journey of discovery just by waving your phone at a Near Field-enabled piece of print advertising. Currently, there are only a few smartphones able to detect the NFC chip, and the cost of making the chip itself is prohibitive for large scale use: but then a personal computer used to be the size of a house and cost the equivalent of a small arms budget, so keep your eyes peeled for future use!

Microfilm Scanning
A microfilm scanner enables the holders of existing bodies of print information (libraries, universities and Government departments, for example) to digitise catalogues going back hundreds of years. A microfilm scanner converts the information contained in 16mm and 35mm film of original print documents and records into multiple digital file formats, allowing the archives of some of the world’s most important institutions to be opened to the public. Microfilm scanning also ensures that irreplaceable knowledge isn’t lost in the unfortunate event of fire or flood damaging the originals. Click here for details.
The Author is a professional online journalist, who has spent the last 15 years tracking the development of digital technology in his blogs and articles. He has had articles published on more than 200 high profile sites, and his own network of technology blogs routinely attracts more than half a million daily visitors.