(CN) — Advances in technology has made the manufacturing industry an easier and safer environment for people to work in. Modern manufacturing might evoke an image of industrial robot arms swinging about, grabbing and dropping parts and materials. With the use of acoustic fabrication, though, we may be able to eliminate not only human intervention, but machine contact entirely.
The acoustic levitation of small objects has been studied in the past, but in a paper published Wednesday, researchers at the Public University of Navarre in Spain took things a step further with development of LeviPrint, a system that can freely position material within a generated acoustic field. By pairing this levitation mechanism with a droplet injector, they present a completely contactless acoustic fabrication system.
“We can manipulate small, brittle parts, as well as liquids or powders, thus making the processes more versatile. There is less cross-contamination, as the manipulator does not touch the material,” says Iñigo Ezcurdia, a PhD student at the university and lead author of the research, in a press release.
It seems unlikely that sound could accomplish this, but the acoustic forces exerted by an array of ultrasonic emitters can essentially trap material in an acoustic field, where it can be levitated and reoriented.
“Particles inside an acoustic field are subjected to radiation forces, it is possible to design the fields so that these forces converge from all directions into a point in which the particles get trapped,” the study reads. “In the most basic configuration, an emitter opposed to a reflector creates a standing wave and particles are trapped at its nodes. More complex arrangements allow for dynamic control of the trapped particles.”
According to Asier Marzo, lead researcher and co-author of the study, the stick shape initially presented some challenges for the converging forces.
“We tried to levitate sticks with a regular standing wave, but it was rotating freely around one axis. We tried to join the sticks with spray glue, but it was ejecting the levitated part and it was very messy,” Marzo said in the release. “Finding a method to fully trap a stick was the main challenge and related to that finding a metric to measure trapping (in position and orientation) that made sense in terms of physics.”
The researchers experimented with different frequencies and simulations, as well as different arrangements for array of levitators to trap the stick in the right configuration to be manipulated. They found that to hold the stick in place, ultrasonic frequencies would need to be applied to either the ends of the sticks or flatly along the whole of the stick. Two opposing bowl-shaped levitators affixed onto a robot arm could trap the stick between the bowls and allow the system to reposition and reorient to fabricate different structures.
Ezcurdia and his team proved the ability of LeviPrint to handle delicate materials beyond the wooden sticks, as the system can even levitate liquid droplets with a precise frequency to avoid bursting the liquid.
The manipulation of droplets of UV glue and resin were key to the fabrication element. By combining the levitated droplets and sticks, LeviPrint can create 3D structures, like a small cube or even a tiny bridge, all without coming into contact with the machine itself.
In the study, LeviPrint was used in the manipulation of small beads and sticks to create 3D structures, but the system could potentially be revolutionary in the manufacturing of electronics. Authors of the study even foresee wider scale usage in bio-engineering.
“Assembling of micromechanical devices such as watches or the zoom mechanism of a phone camera, a more powerful version of LeviPrint will be useful there,” said Marzo in an email interview with Courthouse News. “But most of the cool applications are in bio, working in water instead of air.”
LeviPrint will be presented in August at SIGGRAPH, a prestigious conference of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
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