 So we had the ID TechX here in Berlin and who are you? Hello, my name is Richard Janssen, I'm from the Brightlands Material Centre. So what is the Brightlands Material Centre? We are a research institute and we do all kinds of inspiring innovations in materials. So is this allowed to do 3D printing? Yes, we investigate materials for 3D printing. So for example we have developed new materials for dental applications. So these are photopolymers for tooth, crowns and bridges which can be implemented in the jaw patients. So those are real? These are real? Yes. It's not just for show? It's not for show. This is commercialized by our partner Nextent and they are for sale. What is the material? Because the teeth have to last a long time. Yes. Then you have to be able to chew stuff. It's a lot of power. Yes, and a lot of abrasion as well. So this is a photopolymer, an acrylate with filler in it. Yes. So there are these. So there is a filler, but around it is 3D printed? No, so it's only the tooth that is printed. This is actually just to hold them and to show them. So it's a tooth that is printed and you're right. So the mechanical performance of a teeth is very important. Abrasion but also mechanical strength. They need to be very similar to your natural teeth as well. But we're doing an extra new development because if you look at it very well, this teeth has one color. It's mono color. But if you look at your teeth in your mouth, they have a, look at my teeth, they have a shaded or shaded as a gradient in the color. So if I put this teeth in the front of my mouth, you're going to see that. So the next development that we're doing, and that is very exciting that I can show you this because it's the first ever made example of this, is that we're going to make a multi-material system in which we can include the color. So in this case it's blue, but that's only for showing. We're not going to print a blue teeth, of course, but we're going to include the color in the material system. And that means that we're going to print one material in the other material, in the 3D printing. So that means it becomes yellow? If you choose yellow, it becomes yellow. If you want it to be blue, we can do blue. We can do all colors. If your teeth are better than normal teeth, then it's like the super teeth. Everybody would want to change their teeth. Is that going to happen? I don't think that's going to happen because if you put a teeth between your natural teeth, it's going to erode out the natural teeth. So if it is stronger than the others, it's going to erode the other teeth away. That's not a good thing to happen. So it should be as close to possible to your natural teeth. That's the goal. If you bite somebody, it might be like an attack. That's the nice thing of 3D printing. You could also, oh, there they go already. But maybe there are some people that would like red teeth. Or maybe you want to have your flag printed in your teeth. Flag? For the World Cup. For the World Cup? Exactly. These are some other examples of 3D printing. Yeah, so that's more a general example of 3D printing. There are several different ways that you could do 3D printing. So this is what's called... It's printing from a liquid. It's a photopolymer. And you get a very smooth surface. In fact, this is the same material that we used for the gums of the tooth here. This is a similar one, but it's a different type of material. It's not filled. This is in powder printing technology. So it's again a little bit different. But you see that the surface is less smooth compared to the photopolymer, the liquid polymer printing. And here is another powder printed. It's a different material, but this one is more elastic. And again, because of the color, you see the layers in the frog. This frog is a nice gimmick. It looks funky, but basically we use it because it's a very good example and we can really showcase the performance of the printer technology itself and the process. Is it flexible so we can jump? We can try. Not quite. We need to train. Are you also sure that it can have a lot of detail? This one. The car has a very different feature in 3D printing. One other thing that 3D printing can do is you can print and it's completely assembled. So this is a car. This was printed in one go. There are many different separate elements in here. But this is not put together later on. They're not printed separately, but they're printed in one go. Actually the whole thing comes out of a printer like this. So completely functional. Yes, so you can turn it up. And then if you let it go, it goes. So this was printed in one go. These are all assembly steps in the process. Are you going to be able to print Swiss watches? Oh yes, in the future. No, but it's a good idea actually. A clock? A big clock? What is this bone about? You're not going to make bones are you? No, we're not going to make bones. Actually this bone is just a showcase. But what it does showcase is that we're working on medical scaffolds for tissue engineering. And they're doing a lot in material development. Because if you make a scaffold for example in a bone, but also in hard patches and you create a scaffold the cells of the bone are going to grow back much better than without a scaffold. So they can have the possibility to grow into the bone. And that gives a much better result healing than when you don't use a scaffold. So what does that mean? In the future there will be 3D printed bones? Yes, part of bones. And they will dissolve and your natural bone will grow back into it. It'll be fine. But nobody right now is working on a 3D printed bone right? They are. A lot of people actually. Are you talking about the hip replacement? No, something else? These are smaller parts. People are working on a lot of scaffolds for tissue, but also soft organs like the heart and the knee. That's already being done. What is this? This advantage of a lot of 3D printing objects is that you print in layers. The problem is that you don't get the same mechanical performance in all directions within the parts. So in the Z direction you get a different performance mechanical performance in the X and Y direction. So what we are working on is starting a project to print continuous fibers in the parts. Meaning that we can completely control the orientation but also the position of the fiber within the part. And in that search we have full control of the mechanical performance of such a part. What is that one? You need to come in. I have no clue what that is. So I'm going to learn here. Hi, who are you? I'm Richard. I work as a research scientist also for Browlands Materials Center. These sort of objects are called metamaterials. Metamaterials. Metamaterials are meant to be materials which display properties that regular materials or natural materials do not display on their own. And in this case these patterning features that you see inside this red casing it's given the functionality to the materials. The ability to control different optical properties or magnetic properties of the material that you will not naturally find in any naturally occurring material. So this opens so many doors. For what for example? You could do for instance an invisibility clock. That's what people claim. Why? You can think that if you are on a recommission you don't want to be detected, right? So you can kind of cover your airplane with this sort of material. How are you going to be able to add that functionality to why is this going to be able to enable that? Well, the thing is that you kind of make it invisible to the different radar frequencies before detection. Yeah, you could do that. But this pattern right here, what is it for? This pattern is to demonstrate that we could do any pattern that we want within the structure. So it's up to the people with the different applications to come with the need what kind of pattern they need and we demonstrate that it is possible with this technology to achieve that. So that's what we're showing here. It's really printed. So what's going on at the Brightlands Materials Center? Is there a lot of people? Yes, there's a lot of people. We have a lot of students. We have our own researchers but we also have a lot of PhD students from the University of Maastricht and Eindhoven University. And they do the fundamental investigations for us and we use that knowledge and apply that for customers and companies into useful applications. Do you work together with the host the health systems? Yes, there are many different TNO institutes and we work with a number of them. For example, this one we talked about but this is together with TNO the food people in size. What does that do? This is a model of the gut in your human body. So what they actually want to do is they want to make an artificial gut so they can test what microorganisms or what is happening in your gut when you eat a specific type of food. But to mimic the human gut they also mimic the internal gut structure and the internal gut structure has really in it so that on this yellow part you see very little hair-like structure. This really structure we have 3D printed but that's not good enough for microorganisms. They need more. They also need this to be permeable so the nutrients that they need to eat and the water that they live in need to go through the structure. So 3D printing is a lot of things happening. Yes. Do you have huge machines like some really cool 3D printers? Yes. What do you use to do all this? We use, typically we are a research institute we try to use or we want to use printers that are open. That means that they are very controllable. We want to be able to control all the parameters play around, go to the limits open source, open materials and open software. So we typically sometimes we need to make our own printers otherwise that's not possible. When you make your own you make them open source? We make them open source, yes. So you have some good ones you made yourself? Yes, our sister organization AM Systems make the printers for us. We are fully focused on the materials so we have company there.