New Micro-3D Printing Technique Could Benefit Pentagon.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin

The Defense Department has been researching and investing in additive manufacturing technologies for years, but emerging techniques and procedures being developed by industry could spark new opportunities.

One promising new technology that could aid the military is micro-3D printing, which enables the miniaturization of parts and components. "There are numerous areas where this can help the DoD," said James Zunino III, senior scientific technical manager for munitions at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's advanced materials and manufacturing division.

These include enhancing capabilities to existing systems, volume optimization to reduce the size and weight of equipment troops must carry, and allowing for new technology solutions that were previously unavailable, he said during a recent webinar hosted by Fedlnsider.

John Kawola, CEO of Boston Micro Fabrication, a Maynard, Massachusettsbased company, said micro-3D printing is a burgeoning market.

"Certainly, miniaturization is a growing field," he said during a webinar sponsored by Design World. "More and more medical device companies, electronics companies, optics and photonics companies want to make things smaller and smaller. The market demand is there [and] the pressure from customers for applications" is there.

Boston Micro Fabrication is conducting pioneering work with micro-3D printing techniques to meet the growing demand, Kawola said.

"BMF has really developed the technology to try to develop and help engineers with this and enable them to better design and reach their miniaturization goals," he said.

For many pieces of equipment, such as lenses or sensors, there is a trend to make them smaller and smaller, he said. But traditional manufacturing techniques that have historically been used to make the parts don't scale well and have other limitations.

To address this, the company developed a process it calls projection micro stereolithography, he said. The technique allows for the rapid photopolymerization of a layer of resin with ultraviolet light at micro-scale resolution, allowing the company to achieve ultra-high accuracy precision and resolution that cannot be achieved with other technologies, according to Kawola's slides.

For micro-scale parts, engineers and designers often don't have a good way to prototype today, he said. BMF's new process can help with that.

"Right now, we're fulfilling a real need because we're able to make things at the scale... that designers...