Traditional 3D printing builds objects layer by layer, but tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (TVAM) takes a different approach. It uses laser light to illuminate a rotating vial of resin, solidifying material only where the accumulated energy surpasses a specific threshold. A key advantage of TVAM is its speed—it can produce objects in seconds, whereas conventional layer-based 3D printing takes about 10 minutes. However, its efficiency is a major drawback, as only about 1% of the projected light contributes to forming the intended shape.
Researchers from EPFL’s Laboratory of Applied Photonic Devices, led by Professor Christophe Moser, and the SDU Centre for Photonics Engineering, led by Professor Jesper Glückstad, have developed a more efficient TVAM technique, as reported in Nature Communications.
Their method reduces the energy required for fabrication while improving resolution. Instead of encoding information in the amplitude (height) of projected light waves, as in traditional TVAM, their approach projects a three-dimensional hologram of the desired shape onto the rotating resin vial, leveraging the phase (position) of the light waves for greater precision.
This small change has a big impact. “All pixel inputs are contributing to the holographic image in all planes, which gives us more light efficiency as well as better spatial resolution in the final 3D object, as the projected patterns can be controlled in the projection depth,” Moser summarizes.
In the recently published work, the team printed complex 3D objects such as miniature boats, spheres, cylinders, and art pieces in under 60 seconds with exceptional accuracy, using 25 times less optical power than previous studies.
To read more, click here.