Printing of Functional Materials
- Three-dimensional printing constructs a prototype by "printing" appreciably thick cross-sections of material on top of one another.
- U.S Patent 6,319,530 describes a "Method of photocopying an image onto an edible web for decorating iced baked goods". In other words, this invention enables one to inkjet print a food-grade color photograph on a birthday cake's surface. Many bakeries now carry these types of decorations, which are printable using edible inks and dedicated inkjet printers. Edible ink printing can be done using normal home use inkjet printers like Canon Bubble Jet printers with edible ink cartridges installed, and using rice paper or frosting sheets.
- Inkjet printers and similar technologies are used in the production of many microscopic items. See Microelectromechanical systems.
- Inkjet printers are used to form conductive traces for circuits, and color filters in LCD and plasma displays.
- Inkjet printers, especially models produced by Dimatix (now part of Fujifilm), Xennia Technology and Pixdro, are in fairly common use in many labs around the world for developing alternative deposition methods that reduce consumption of expensive, rare, or problematic materials. These printers have been used in the printing of polymer, macromolecular, quantum dot, metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes etc. The applications of such printing methods include organic thin-film transistors, organic light emitting diodes, organic solar cells, sensors, etc.
- Inkjet technology is used in the emerging field of bioprinting.
Read more about this topic: Inkjet Printing
Famous quotes containing the words printing, functional and/or materials:
“It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit—if totally different in form—from all the romantic architecture of the past.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)