November 23, 2021 Leave a Comment Oak Ridge National Laboratory has recently published a paper in Nature Communications detailing their most recent 3D printing achievement in the field of binder jetting. The latest discovery demonstrates a rapid and cost effective method of printing silica sand structures with the use of a custom-made polymer as the binder. The structures so far have proven capable of supporting 300x their own weight, which according to ORNL, is equivalent to standing twelve Empire State Buildings on the Brooklyn Bridge. Infact, the structure in question was indeed a miniature bridge, and you can see it supporting a huge lump of metal in the image below. Strong sand! (Image credit: ORNL) Typically for binder jetting applications a polymer is used as the resin to bind the matter together. The new polymer known as polyethyleneimine (PEI) was tailor made for the application and has been demonstrated to… read more