One day you will get anything you want without going to local supermarket. The only thing you’d have to buy will be an inkjet printer. Using it, you will not just print images and text, but also get yourself other stuff for very day life.

The scientists have adopted the inkjet printer for printing electric circuits, artificial bones, blood vessels and body organs. Yet, inkjet printing proves versatile technology for creating other non-imaging products.

A Massachusetts, US-based company Konarka Technologies has announced that it has successfully manufactured solar cells using inkjet printing technology. Using the existing and very simple technologies of an office inkjet printer, Konarka has replaced ink with the solar cell material, and paper with a thin flexible sheet of plastic.

Here is how it works. The printhead of an inkjet printer deposits a solar cell material into a thin flexible plastic sheet. According to the company, the process creates solar cells which are almost as good as the silicon ones, created with more advanced technologies. The beauty of the new method is that it makes solar panel much cheaper, as it uses existing, generally accepted technology and requires no special clean premises.

Multiple colors can be added to “ink” to print patterns onto the cells, customizing them for different environments. Konarka says the technology may ultimately produce solar cells to generate energy from both sunlight and indoor light, and to supply lower power devices, like indoor or sensor applications.

The flexibility of the solar cells allows for a variety of locations where traditional solar panels could not be installed. Moreover, Rick Hess, president and CEO of Konarka, said in an interview to PopularMechanics.com that they “constantly receive calls from innovators who have read about the cells and propose unique—sometimes wild and crazy—concepts for the technology.”

For the moment, the inkjet printing is only feasible for large productions of solar cells. First consumer products are not likely to appear within next two years.

Popularity: 2%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Students of Georgia Institute of Technology has created a robot named PrintBot that can print out images of virtually unlimited sizes. On their site, Instructibles.com, they published a detailed step-by-step printer creation guide.

The PrintBot uses a printhead from an Epson inkjet printer (as it was expected to use it, the printhead, not Epson) and Talcum powder instead of inks. The printer is said to support wireless remote control and is based on iRobot Create, which, in turn, is analog of iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaning robot.

This device can perform on almost any horizontal faces, and the creators suggest using it for sidewalk painting and advertisement.

I wonder if this idea can be transformed for document printing. For instance, instead of paper running through the printer, a smal printing bot creates an image or a text line-by-line on a sheet of paper. Just like living pen. One could give it a ‘handwriting’ (as far as this term can be applied to a printer robot) style that could customly created and changed. Well, the sky is the limit to development of this idea.

In this video you can see the PrintBot at work:

Here is the results of its work (can’t make out what that is):

I really liked this bot. Hopefully, next thing they ‘teach’ it is to print on vertical faces and with use of paint.

Popularity: 1%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

California-based company has developed a technology that may enable cheap electronic microchips and large displays.

As time passed, inkjet printing technology finds application in areas having little or nothing to do with producing texts, graphics or photos. Inkjet printers have been successfully adopted into bioengineering (for printing tissues of human body) and electronics (for printing electronic circuits). These are two industries that require high precision in manipulation with ultra-fine particles, just what inkjet technology can do. Now let’s get to the point.

A California-based company named Kovio announced a new process that can be used for printing memory and logic chips transistors. This technology is particularly convenient as it uses commercial printing equipment such as inkjet printers, which make the production of microchips cheap and easy.

Currently, Kovio’s method uses several types of commercial printers, including inkjet models. Also, the company has developed a variety of inks for printing different electric circuits. The estimations are system requires only 5% of the materials and a 25% of the electrical power used in conventional chip-making processes.

For now, conventional microchips are more advanced then those made using printing technologies. Printed chips are still larger and usually have much less transistors (thousands compared to hundreds of millions). However, low production cost of the printer microchips makes them applicable for a large range of common objects. Thus, the first products made by Kovio are likely to be disposable smart cards for public transportation.

The feature of Kovio’s development is the use of inorganic semiconducting materials instead of organic materials. Despite a slightly higher price, the inorganic transistors perform 100 to 1,000 times better than organic transistors.

The higher performance of inorganic devices may also prove useful for organic LED-based displays. Printing techniques are very well suited for distributing transistors over large areas, and that makes them suitable for making really large displays that could cover, say, a wall.

Hopefully, this technology proves viable, because, personally, I could wait a couple of years for cheap wall-sized display to appear in my room.

Popularity: 3%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

HP claimed it’s giving up its camera manufacturing business. Instead the company plans to focus more resources on Print 2.0 – the new web-centered printing concept.

However, the company is going to maintain the brand and now is looking for an OEM partner that will design, build and distribute digital cameras under HP label.

HP wants to accelerate its investment in Print 2.0 initiative, which the company unveiled in May at its Imaging and Printing Conference in New York. According to HP, 53 trillion pages will be printed in 2010, creating a market valued at more than $296 billion. Most part of those pages is to be printed from the Web. HP’s Print 2.0 strategy is focused on using Web-based services to get a significant share of the growing number of digital pages printed each year.

This move of HP seems very logical, I mean who ever bought HP digital cameras?

Purchasing future revenues, HP also keeps up with current developments. Researchers from Palo Alto have created toner particles that are chemically grown. Usually toner powder is produced by mechanically grounding carbon block, but HP’s spherical monochrome toner is vat-grown.

Such chemical origination of toner has some advantages over regular toner. HP claims chemical growth of toner results in a consistently round toner particle. Even round particles allows for a more efficient printing process leading to a smaller cartridge. HP also claims that printer toner would be applied on paper more precisely because of the evenness of this new toner particle.

Let’s turn from Goliath to David. A start-up company from Cambridge, Inkski, has developed a very fast printing method. The new technology called “Lilo”, Light Initiated Liquid Offset, can deliver up to 400,000 drops per second from each channel. This is about 20 times faster than a general inkjet print head can produce.

Lilo works like this. Drops of ink are formed in a regular array on a rapidly rotating cylinder, using a photonic trigger to eject drops. The tiny drops can be held on the cylinder by surface tension balanced against the centrifugal force tending to throw them off. A laser beam releases drops from the cylinder.

The Lilo technology uses conventional inks and offers nearly similar per page costs as standard methods of digital printing, except pages can be printer much faster. The technology employs no nozzles, so there should be no clogging and smudging.

Hope to see new printer built using this technology.

Popularity: 2%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

The idea of creating artificial body organs is not new. It has been vastly developed in sci-fi literature, where the very process of creation was surrendered to the imagination of the author. Few people know that scientists have long been into this area and have reached some positive results.

Science Daily reports that Gabor Forgacs, a professor of physics in the MU College of Arts and Science, has been developing and perfecting the process of “printing” tissues, aiming at building human organs. In his recent study, Forgacs showed that creating tissue structures by means of printing maintain the properties of the composing cells, and the very process resembles the way living tissues are created in nature.

The researchers used bio-ink particles, or spheres with 10,000 to 40,000 cells, and “printed” them on sheets of special “bio-paper.” The spheres then began to fuse in the bio-paper into one structure, pretty much like drops of water stick together into a larger drop of water. The size and shape of the resulting structure can be controlled by removing bio-paper to stop the fusion.

Previously, there have been two obstacles that prevented printing tissues using large amounts of cells. First, it was necessary to find out how to get right cells to the right places locations within the tissue. Second, even with the right cells positioned in the right place, it was unclear how to make an organ start working.

In the course of the study, it turned out that both problems get solved almost automatically. As the tissue structure begins to form, the cells go through a natural process called “sorting,” which is nature’s way of determining where specific cells need to be. For example, an artery has three specific types of cells — endothelial cells, smooth muscle cells and fibroblast cells, each type needing to be in a specific location in the artery. As thousands and thousands of cells are added to the bio-paper under controlled conditions, the cells migrate automatically to their specific locations to make the structure form correctly.

The team also found that nature was the answer to the second question. In the study, scientists took cells from a chicken heart and used them to form bio-ink particles, which were then printed on to thick sheets. Heart cells must be synchronized for the heart to beat properly. When the bio-ink particles were first printed, the cells did not beat in unison, but as the cellular spheroids fused, the structure eventually started beating just as a heart does.

Popularity: 2%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

American scientists please us with another achievement in printing technology. They found a new method printing finely-detailed microscopic images with an enzyme instead of ink.

The new method known as microcontact printing and reported to have a wide application for rapidly transferring high-resolution images onto large surfaces. However, current nanoscale printing technology depends on the diffusion of ink, and cannot reproduce details finer than one hundred nanometers in diameter.

In the new technology, “biocatalytic microcontact printing”, a nano-print is coated with an enzyme - a protein that fastens chemical reactions.

The enzyme then digests away a layer on the surface, leaving behind an imprint almost like an old-fashioned rubber stamp. Because the process does not require diffusion of ink, the resolution of microcontact printed images is about 100 times greater than conventional technology allows for.

The technique creates potential for faster, less expensive methods of nanolithography, which could be used to create complex structures for micromachines, biosensors, and other nanoscale devices, says Science Daily.

Popularity: 1%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Modern printers are much smarter than the original printing devices they were like, say, 10 years ago. Aside from just printing, they can scan, copy, send faxes, automatically connect to the Web for software updates, and so on. The only thing printer couldn’t do was translation. Not until now.

Fuji Xerox Corporation developed a technology that enables laser printers and copiers to translate the text to be printed. The idea behind the technology is simple — the printer scans a sheet of text, and then connects to a dedicated server on the internet where the text is translated and sent back to printer for output. The translating algorithms on the server can distinguish between text, drawings and lines, so page layouts remain.

So far, only four languages are available for translation: Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.

The laser printer is still a prototype and the technology will take time be refined to be ready for market. No information is yet available as for the quality of the translation, hopefully it will be better than that of Babel Fish or Google Translate.

Popularity: 1%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!