 to another episode of In the Studio. I'm Lynn Weaver. Our topic is 3D printing. Gosh, that sounds very interesting. My guests are Russell Netschis. He is a microbiologist during his PhD at the Genome Center here at UC Davis. And Steven Lucero, and he is a mechanical engineer at UC Davis in the Department of Biomedical Engineer. And facility manager of the team prototyping lab. And team is an acronym for translating engineering advances to medicine. That's right. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you. I'm delighted to have you here. And I'm looking forward to be enlightened because I know nothing about 3D printing except that it has a very nice sound to it. So the question, the obvious questions is, and I'm going to have two takes on this. What is 3D printing? And then I'm going to ask Steven. And Steven, listen before don't prepare what you're going to say to contradict your friend. I don't know if he wants to steal my thunder. Oh dear. Go ahead, okay. What is 3D printing? Well, there are a variety of ways of manufacturing three-dimensional objects. Traditionally, what you would do is you would start with a block of stuff like plastic or aluminum or wood. Or Lego. That's actually close to 3D printing. Ignore me. Yeah, that's okay. So you start with a block of stuff, right? And then you use some sort of tool, like say for example, like a rotating bit. End mill, as it's called. End mill, yes, right. End mill, did you say? End mill. So in traditional manufacturing, that's one of the tools. Oh yes, yes. Yes, of course. I do a little of both. He's being the pedantic machinist here, so. Yeah. I'm a scientist, I use silly terms for things. So you start out with a block of stuff and you chew away the parts of it that you don't want there. I think it was Michelangelo who said that the sculpture is already in the marble. In the marble. And you just have to remove the bits that you don't need. And so this is called subtractive manufacturing. Subtracting. And this is, you need dimensional or is it multi-dimensional, this stuff? So you literally would start with a block of aluminum and then subtract, right? So that's traditional manufacturing. That's how things have been done for a long time. Since the Industrial Revolution. Sure. And before that even. Yes. Yeah, I mean if you think of like sculpture. So that was then. And now we're looking at now, 3D printing. So if you imagine, if you're sculpting in marble, you would remove the bits that you don't want. But if you were sculpting in clay, you would take the clay and stick it together like little pieces of clay until you get a larger clay body. That's the thing that you want. That's called additive manufacturing. And so what has happened with 3D printers is that 3D printers allow you to do additive manufacturing with computer control. So instead of putting little bits of material together, yourself with your fingers, you have the computer controlling a robotic gantry to stick the material where you want it to go. And there's some important differences in the topological constraints that basically what is possible to manufacture with these two different techniques. Like for example, if you imagine you had a sphere and you wanted to make a hollow sphere with something inside of it that was not attached to anything that would rattle around. A good example would be of a similar sort of part would be those little whistles that you use for track and field. There's a little bead inside that rattles around. And somehow you have to get the bead in there. And usually what that means is you have to manufacture two separate parts. You put the bead in and then you close it up. With 3D printing, because of the unique way that it assembles the part, if you imagine you're sticking together all the little bits, you can manufacture it with the bead already in there, already captured inside. So that's what I mean by a topological constraint. It's why a constraint? So if you were going to manufacture traditionally, you're going to start by removing all the bits that you don't want, you wouldn't have a way of getting the bead inside the cavity. Whereas with additive manufacturing, you have fewer topological constraints. OK, so far, so good. I can follow you. What about you, Steven? So that's kind of the fundamentals of how 3D printing works. You start with a solid model, typically something that you've designed within computer aided design, or CAD software. And the software will essentially take that model and slice it up into small layers. Interesting. And really the fundamental role of the printer is actually to take those layers and deposit them. So it's, in principle, a pretty simple process. It's just a matter of depositing layers until you end up with a 3D object. So this is interesting. Is it true that the 3D printing technology is not very novel that has been here for quite a while, when I say maybe more than two years? Early 80s. Early 80s. It's actually one of the most important. And what was it used for then? Mostly prototyping. Oh, prototyping for architectures. That would be one example. A lot of aerospace prototyping also. Because the original 3D printers, they used materials that were quite expensive. And so it would be less expensive than machining apart from titanium or something like that. So if you were making the screw for a submarine drive. My goodness. And you wanted to test, like, it's hydrodynamics and things like that. Well, OK, maybe we should 3D print this before we actually start cutting titanium. So that was fascinating. But of course, to me, what is really end to our audience, now what is really wonderful from what I read is the applications that you can yield from this technology. And for example, I'll come back to you. But Russell, you told me the story of how you used it for your PhD dissertation. And can you tell us in just a few words what you did? Yeah. What attracted you to the 3D printer? So I kind of got interested in this for kind of a very funny reason. I'm a microbiologist. And one of the things that's happened recently in microbiology is we've been scaling up the number of experiments that we do in the course of a project. So the project that I'm interested in, I potentially had to handle tens of thousands of samples. That was sort of the worst case scenario. Unfortunately, it didn't go. Molecule? So samples of little pieces. These are like different, like actually samples from different organisms. Oh, I see. Yes. Little bits and pieces of something. So you could think of each one as a totally separate experiment. And I would have potentially 10,000 of them. Oh my gosh. It was my headache. Yeah, it gave me a headache when I realized, when I penciled out what the worst case scenario was. So I was like, oh my gosh, I have to go tell my committee that the worst case scenario is 10,000 DNA preps and 10,000 sequencing samples. And so I wanted to make sure that when I went and did my qualifying exam, that I could at least tell them that plausibly there was a way I could do this automatically. And so I broke down the process, and I said, well, OK, there's all these different steps that are basically, you treat every experiment the same. There's this one step that was really, really simple where you had to treat each experiment separately. And it was basically like you get the DNA from the sample, and you extract the DNA, and you get kind of like a random concentration, and then the rest of the reactions need a uniform concentration. So there's a step where you take the random concentration, you add a little bit of water, and then you bring it to the right concentration, and then you proceed with the rest of the chemistry. And so it turned out that the rate-limiting step for scaling this to 10,000 reactions was just adding the right amount of water to each experiment. It was like, OK, so I'll get a robot. And have the robot dispense the water, that'll be great. So I went shopping for robots, and most of the liquid handling robots were really expensive and really not very good. And the software was really annoying to work with, so I said, well, I'll buy an inexpensive 3D printer, and I'll just remove the nozzle, and just put a little thing that just squirts water. That's fantastic. And that's how you succeeded. Actually, it turned out I didn't need to do that. You didn't need to do that, so it was even easier. So Stephen, how do you see this 3D printers help biomedical science? Yeah, you are the facility manager for the Prototyping Lab, so you can do a lot of prototyping. I'm sorry, I'm hurrying you a little bit, because we have limited time. But hopefully, I can entice the audience to go to your website, which is bme.ucdavis.edu, slash team. So traditionally, we talked about how you make things traditionally. The problem with that method is that it takes a long time. It takes a lot of effort to design cutting pads and things like that, versus with 3D printing. We essentially feed it what we want, and within a matter of hours, we have our design. So more than anything, it's expedited everything. And we can also achieve far more complicated geometry as well. For example, this is a collaboration that we have with the vet med teaching hospital. Maybe you can hold it up a little bit. Like so, yeah. The last poor Yorick, I knew him well. What is it? What is it? So this is a pretty interesting object. This is a 3D printed dog skull. And this is derived from CT imaging data. So this is a live patient. And this is clearly not a real skull. This is based on imaging data. And if we look, I don't know if the camera will be able to pick this up, but if we look right here, you can see that this particular skull has a cancerous growth represented here. And so what the surgeon will do is actually inspect this model and do their surgical pre-planning prior to their operation. Which is wonderful. Yes, it makes their life significantly easier. They have everything planned out, thought out. If they need to design any implants, that can be done beforehand before the animal is even under the knife. Oh, that's fantastic. Do you have another example you want to share with us? Well, scattered about a little cushion here. We have just a number of different cases. I'm curious about the shoe. OK. This is actually a design that a prototype that my friend Mary Huang made for herself. We were collaborating on a project that became a small company that she's launching. So the reason why she designed this, this isn't my design. I was showing her a cool design. So we wanted to see if we could make a shoe out of a flexible material. So this is made out of rubber. Yeah, it's basically a plasticized rubber. And so it's actually wearable. I think if you're a size 8, this will fit you. I see. Size 8? Well, it's interesting. There is one missing. And then I'd love you to give us that a little bit of a demo really quickly. But there's one thing that I'm afraid comes to mind. And I'm trying to understand. So now the data that you feed in this computer in, sorry, in that you give to the printer to print is actually a multi-dimensional file? That's right. Multi-dimensional file. So you need to have an application that supports that. That can generate these. It can generate that. And this CAD being one of them, right? CAD is kind of a general term for that process. Yeah, for that. So that's all you need, basically. And then the imagination and the choice of material is up to the scientists or up to the engineer. And that's kind of an ever-expanding process as well. I have to say that the lab, the team lab, serves many departments at the university, right? Across the entire university, that's right. So you must be very, very busy. And how does it work? The medical school or the genome center or the biology department, they come to you? And what does it say? So it can come from a couple of different ways. So I can have someone who has never done anything like this before. Like me? Correct. And you have this faint concept of what you want to achieve. And I can take you through design to creation, to a tangible object. Or we can simply make use of the printers. So let's say you already have a design. You have the skills to generate the model. And then you're just pretty. And we will give it to you. And the choice of material is also very quite ranging. For example, give me an example of material. Plastic, we saw the plastic lab. Rigid plastics, flexible rubber-like materials. This is actually wood. That's wood. That's wood. That's wood composite. What about paper if you want to make an origami type thing? Yeah, well, of course, you don't have to 3D print something to make paper. I know. Wooden is a pretty close analog paper, right? Well, I'm afraid we have just a little time left. So Russell, take it away. Your demo. My demo? Well. Take it away. OK, so this is a 3D printer. It doesn't look very high-tech. It looks more like a crate, that particular one. So we probably don't have time to actually print something, unfortunately. But turn it on first. Yeah, so it's running now. And I can just all point out the different parts of it. Essentially, the main parts are there's a platform where the part actually gets built. If you look closely on the build platform, there's actually a failed print already stuck to it. We ran out of plastic in the middle of the print, so it's just sitting there. So it's jammed. Well, it's just out. It's empty. So the plastic sits on a spool in the back like this. And it comes as these wire-like filaments. And what are you going to do with that? And so the first thing that happens is there's a little motor with a little gear in it that basically grabs onto the plastic. Shreds it? And shoves it up through this tube here. And then down into this little nozzle, and there's a little aluminum block here that heats up to about 220 degrees Celsius, which is enough to melt the plastic. And it just squirts the plastic out of the nozzle. So you shouldn't put your hand in there? Yeah, I've burned myself a few times on it. Don't tell EH&S. No, no, no, I won't. So basically the. No, it's off now, and she's doing it. I just switched it off so I can move the motors around. So the computer basically pushes the nozzle around to basically put the plastic where you want it to go. And basically, so it'll build up a layer. And then as you continue building the part, the. Stage drops down. Yeah, the stage drops down so that you can build a layer on top of layer. That's fantastic. Fundamentally, it's a glorified hot glue gun, is what it really looks like. This particular system. That particular one. Well, gentlemen, I'm so sorry we have to leave it there because we're out of time. But I hope our audience will be enticed to learn much more. And again, go to the website or go and see these two gentlemen. I'm sure that they have in their ample spare time, they'll be able to answer all your questions. So you've been watching in the studio. If you'd like to stream this episode, you can go to our website, dctv.davismedia.org. And we'll also be on YouTube. And while you're there, you can check out some of our other programs. We have fabulous guests and very interesting topics. And I would also like to take a second to thank our sound engineer, Sam, and our technical crew, Matthew, Calvin, and Kevin. Thank you all for watching. And from all of us here, see you next time.