3D printer creates working loudspeaker

Engineers at Cornell University have printed an entire working loudspeaker in one operation using a 3D printer.The device emerged from the printer ready to use, requiring only to be connected to an amplifier and sound source. In a demonstration the researchers played a clip from President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech which mentioned 3D printing.Although it is now possible to buy relatively cheap 3D printers which can make intricate parts from plastic, creating working electronic components remains a difficult problem.Printers can be constructed with multiple cartridges for different materials, just as traditional 2D printers use differently coloured inks. But the large hurdle to overcome is that these materials need to be extruded at different temperatures and have different curing times, making printing one object with two or more materials troublesome.If it becomes possible to do so cheaply then it would pave the way for entire products such as radios, cameras or mobile phones to be printed.Creating the speaker involved printing a plastic housing, a flexible diaphragm, a conductive coil and a magnet. The conductive parts were created with silver ink on a Fab@Home printer, while the magnet was created from a viscous blend of strontium ferrite. The rest was printed with traditional plastic materials.The project was led by mechanical engineering graduate students Apoorva Kiran and Robert MacCurdy, working with associate professor and 3D-printing pioneer Hod Lipson.Creating a market for printed electronic devices, Lipson said, could be like introducing color printers after only black and white had existed: “It opens up a whole new space that makes the old look primitive."(The Telegraph)ANN.Az