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a nonconductive material, such as copper wire wrapped in plastic insula-
tion. If you can print conductors within nonconductors, you could print, say,
robot parts with pre-assembled wiring, cell phone cases with complex custom
antennas, prosthetic devices with built-in sensors, and whole new kinds of
consumer electronic devices.
Printing conductive wires presents a double challenge—one that reaches
beyond merely multimaterial printing. The challenge is to make sure the two
materials are mutually compatible. If you try to print metals and plastics at
the same time, the temperature needed to melt the metal will burn the plastic,
making the two materials incompatible.
It is possible to ind special kinds of conductive metals that have a low
melting temperature compatible with plastic, but those materials are rare and
dificult to use. Alternatively, it is possible to ind nonmetallic conductors, like
electrically conducting plastics, but those are not yet quite as conductive as
metals. And so the search continues.
At Objet, Eduardo and Daniel were conident that printing electrically
conductive materials embedded within nonconductive structural materials
is within reach. The challenge is not technical, they insisted; it's a matter
of business priority. Industry is now craving 3D printing materials that are
stronger and more durable. Conductive materials are a bit beyond the short-
term commercial horizon. They're not yet a priority.
There is a vicious cycle here: Industry wants stronger materials because
it is seeking to emulate the existing materials and capabilities of traditional
manufacturing technologies. The ability to fabricate embedded 3D conduc-
tive wiring does not currently exist in any form in traditional manufacturing.
Except for a few avant-garde robot designers, a market does not yet exist for
3D printed wiring.
Academia's mandate, however, is to look beyond the short-term horizon. If
you peer into the longer-term future, conductive materials will be just the tip
of the iceberg of active materials. Printing batteries, motors and actuators,
transistors, and sensors are just few of the possibilities being explored by
researchers today.
When we look at printing active materials, we're actually talking about
active systems. It is rare that an active material is useful by itself; it usually
requires multiple active materials together, to make something useful. The
challenge is moving from printing passive single-material parts to printing
active, multimaterial integrated systems.
