Bits Blog: Researchers Develop Flexible Metal for 3-D Printers

A group of researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a liquid metal material that could be used in 3-D printers and lead to flexible gadgets.

The technology is outlined in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials, which describes the flexible metal as “stretchable” and explains that many tiny dots of this material could be placed together to create larger, bendable sheets of metal.

screenshot via North Carolina State University Small drops of metal could be connected together to create flexible electronics.

The metal, an alloy of gallium and indium, is liquid at room temperature. But when it is exposed to air the alloy can create a thin skin around its outer layer. Think of the way air bubbles look when floating on top of water.

Although flexible metal might sound futuristic enough, the paper also says that this metal can be “self-healing,” similar to animals that can regenerate limbs when they are sliced off.

“These stretchable wires can be completely severed with scissors and rapidly self-heal both mechanically and electrically,” the paper notes.

A video demonstrating how the technology works uses a syringe to produce tiny dots of the metal that connect with each other and collectively join together.

“The fact that they are liquid means you could surround them with another material like rubber to make metallic structures that you can stretch and deform,” Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of engineering at North Carolina State University, told New Scientist in an interview.

Mr. Dickey said that if the syringe was switched with a 3-D printing head, that would produce a 3-D printer that could print metal. There is at least one caveat though. The material’s cost, he said, is roughly 100 times that of 3-D printing plastic.

Bits Blog: Graphene Could Usher in Flexible, Ultra-Slim Gadgets

Ji Hye Hong Graphene is a fully flexible material.

You’ve probably never heard of graphene, a carbon-based material, but it might be stuffed into your pocket or wrapped around your wrist in the not-too-distant future.

According to the American Chemical Society, graphene is a “wonder material” 100 times stronger than steel and is so thin that a single ounce of it could to cover 28 football fields. It could also usher in a new era of ultra-slim and fully flexible gadgets.

Although graphene has been in the news before, A.C.S. said that it was now currently under development for use in flexible solar panels “that could be used to cover the outside surface of a building, in addition to the roof.” And as soon as these solar panels actually become a viable product, cell phones would be next up on the flexible list.

“Touch screens made with graphene as their conductive element could be printed on thin plastic instead of glass, so they would be light and flexible, which could make cell phones as thin as a piece of paper and foldable enough to slip into a pocket,” the A.C.S. explained in a report on its Web site this week. “Because of graphene’s incredible strength, these cell phones would be nearly unbreakable.”

The March issue of Nature noted that the graphene could also be used to create bionic implants, too, which are essentially electronic devices that are placed inside the human body. Nature predicts that once scientists figure out how to make large batches of graphene economically, it could ”radically advance technologies ranging from transistors to touch screens to solar cells to bionic implants.”

So when can we expect these wonder devices? Scientists aren’t sure just yet, but they do predict that the first consumer application for graphene will be a flexible cell phone.