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printer to a color printer, or from a black-and-white TV to a color TV, adding
just three primary colors gives rise to millions of shades of color. The versa-
tility of what you can make on a 3D printer will grow
exponentially
with the
number of primary materials that can be printed and mixed simultaneously.
This is because you can print not only the base materials, but also combina-
tions of those primary materials that give rise to a combinatorial number of
new permutations.
One of the companies pioneering that exploration of multimaterial print-
ing is Objet—an Israeli company near Tel Aviv, that recently merged with
Stratasys. I visited Objet headquarters to see what is yet to come. Located
in a bustling science park next to orange groves, Objet is changing the way
people think about materials. Objet's CTO Eduardo Napadensky and lead
Material Scientist Daniel Dikovsky show me through the reception hall,
laden with multi-material prints of anatomical models, industrial proto-
types, and toys.
Daniel and Eduardo explained that multimaterial printing is not just about
mixing materials. It's about creating new kinds of materials altogether.
When material scientists obsess over new materials, they are usually inter-
ested in new material properties—characteristics such as weight, strength,
and lexibility. Often engineers are interested in combinations of properties,
such as a material that is both light and strong, or both lexible and optically
clear. Some material properties are intuitive, such as density and lexibility,
and others are less intuitive, such as how many push-pull cycles a material can
go through before it breaks or how long can it be stretched before it snaps. For
example, when engineers design an aircraft wing, the push-pull cycles exerted
on the wing structure by turbulence, or the stress on the fuselage associated
with pressurization and depressurization cycles, need to be accounted for, a
property known as fatigue strength.
Material properties can become complicated to understand and predict, and
“materials by design” remain the Holy Grail of material science. 3D printing
can greatly expand the materials that can be made. The problem is, however,
that we don't know where to look and what to expect.
When irst starting to print with multiple materials, one's intuitive impres-
sion is that properties of the combined mixed materials will lie somewhere
between the properties of the base, primary materials. It stands to reason that
