Q&A with Dr. Vikram Devarajan
How are new materials improving additive manufacturing?
When additive manufacturing first came about, there was literally one type of printer and one medium, and that was it. As other companies came to market, and the technology evolved, there were more printers, but they still behaved like your typical home or office printer, where you can’t put a competitor’s ink into your machine. A big pain point for users was that these 3D printed products had a one size fits all approach: the actual plastics being used all had almost the same end properties. We were all using the same, mostly brittle materials. Public perception of additive manufacturing is somewhat stuck in this time period, too. That you can only really use a 3D printer for making toys or hobby items, maybe making a model of a car or building. Things that, while maybe they’re appreciated, aren’t actually used for anything in particular.
Coming back to today, the market has completely changed: material availability is incredible. You have the three basic types of printing mediums: powder, spools, and liquids; and the properties of the materials you’re using are almost whatever you can dream up. Printers can use plastics, ceramics and even metals to create extremely detailed manufactured items. The materials can be durable or delicate, they can be bendable or rigid — whatever you need. The printers themselves are making massive strides as well. The machines used to take many hours to heat up and struggled to maintain temperature. Nowadays, they heat up in 10-15 minutes and are incredibly precise.
Is there anything at the frontier of 3D printing that has you paying close attention?
We’ve reached the point where printers and the materials will continue to see incremental improvements, but I’m most interested in application development. 3D printing is still a good deal more expensive and time consuming than conventional manufacturing techniques and technologies. Additive manufacturing is great if you need two of something, but what about 200,000? The conventional wisdom has you looking at how to drive costs down – in the materials, in the printing speeds, et cetera – which can and will happen. However, cost reduction is ultimately a solution that happens over a longer period of time.
I’m most curious about how we can unlock new applications of additive manufacturing today. What are new ways that a premium product can be deployed? Immediately what comes to mind is for the medical industry, and we’re already seeing some today. Things like printed casts for broken bones, orthodontics, and assistive devices. Thinking smaller, there are also implants that can help following surgeries to help tissue grow back closer to its original shape. For more consumer-facing markets, there are things hitting shelves like premium shoes and protective athletic gear for contact sports. One of my favorites though for something truly outside the box is Wilson’s airless basketball. It not only represents a serious company working in the additive manufacturing space, but it also serves to inspire people by putting a 3D printed object into their hands.
What was it like to apprentice under Joe Beaman and Carl Deckard?
Joe Beaman was a mentor for both myself and Carl Deckard, though about 20 years or so apart. Joe has a style of leading discussions that was based in intellectual freedom and exploration. He would bring up a topic or an idea, and would give us the space to go out and think about it. If we needed help, Beaman was always there, but he truly wanted us to solve things in our own ways. Deckard was a huge advocate for preparation – and just having a conversation with him, it was easy to see. He would always think through before he answered anything, and wanted to make sure he had his whole answer ready before he started to speak.
Both were pioneers for selective laser sintering, a process that enables us to have additive manufacturing today. I remember a story about Joe asking Carl to come up with a projection for how much he thought it would take to go through the research and development of the first commercial prototype. Carl went and looked everything over, and came back to Joe with a number. Joe looked at the number and doubled it before he took it to his CEO. The CEO thought that it was a bit off, and before they took it to their board, they then doubled it again. Ultimately, the CEO’s math was correct, but Joe was always quick to remind us of this: it always costs more than you plan, and takes longer than you anticipate.
What are your thoughts on the future of science and science commercialization in Austin?
I was able to get my start here in Austin at The University of Texas, and I think that the University is a key part of the discussion. I remember when I was in school, I was able to participate in one of the first 3 Day Startup events. The program has grown to over 200 universities all over the world, but the idea to stick a bunch of the brightest young minds in a room with enough food, water, coffee, and creativity for them to turn out a fleshed out company, that started at UT. Even within the undergraduate classes offered at the University, students are given an entrepreneurial spirit before they graduate. The future has never looked brighter.
When you zoom out and look at Austin, there are two indicators of Austin being a hub of science commercialization: talent and funding. Talent is supported by UT for junior roles, of course, but for experienced industry professionals in science and technology, the major companies setting up shop in Austin is what catches your eye. We have Tesla, Oracle, Google, Apple – everyone is here, and it has created a lot of highly skilled people all in one place. When the talent is centralized like that, it creates opportunities for lab work and hard science.
Funding is going beyond just what a university or grants could do. We’re getting both our own branches of the well-established VC firms here in Austin, but entirely new funds too. Some of it is more well-tread ground, and some of it is focusing on big questions like climate change and the energy transition. It makes a huge difference for startups and founders to not have to spend weeks bouncing back and forth between New York and California, trying to secure funding. Being able to create investor relationships in your own backyard is a tipping point.
What are some of the projects you’re working on right now?
Soft materials have my attention right now, and I want to work on something that is both flexible and durable. I’m currently manufacturing elastomers that are not only extremely flexible, but also tear-resistant. Balancing the material synthesis with engineering into a printable medium is always one of the most interesting parts of the process.
The more challenging part is making it so that it can fit the current market needs and opportunities. If you look out at the highway, there is a mix of cars, both in make and model, but also in how old they are and how well they run given their age. 3D printers are in a similar state, and when designing a new material, it's a constraint to put on yourself. The highest impact materials will be the ones that can be printed regardless of machine, but the biggest advancements will likely happen with a material that can only be printed on specialty machines. It creates an interesting balancing act for scientists and engineers.
What are some of the major challenges facing new energy storage technologies right now?
Storage is the elephant in the room when it comes to renewable energy. With all of the movement surrounding the energy transition, there will also need to be change in batteries. Most of the challenges all tie back to the manufacturing process: building batteries is a slow, dirty, unoptimized process. Like everything else, there is a demand for batteries to be lightweight, efficient, and cheap, and it ends up in a classic, “pick two of three” scenario. Making the parts of a battery, specifically the anode and cathode, is energy intensive, wasteful, and awful for the environment. Regardless of whether you’re making a battery for a smartphone, an electric vehicle, or to store energy from on the grid, the current solvent-based manufacturing process needs to be reevaluated.
What are nanomaterials and how do they impact future materials research?
Nano gets thrown around a lot, normally attached to the word technology or robotics, and we get ideas of tiny machines taking over our bloodstream and the world. Nanomaterials are the necessary building blocks to make said technologies happen. Sadly, we don’t have some way of building and shrinking something down, so we are stuck with the challenge of building machines that are incredibly small. However, along the way to getting to fully fledged nanomachines, scientists and engineers learned that we can build and create precision applications of nanomaterials.
One breakthrough has been the application of graphene sheets to silicon wafers, which for example could operate as very simple switches on an incredibly small scale. However, these can be combined and turned into the next iteration of computer chips, and will represent a monumental jump in our computing capabilities.
Another has been with carbon nanotubes, which have a substantially higher surface area for a very low weight. Carbon is a very common additive in manufacturing, most commonly to prevent a buildup of an electric charge. Normally, carbon is added at around four or five percent of the total product to help combat electrostatic dissipation and maybe even impart some conductivity. However, the same goal can be achieved with a tenth of a percent of carbon nanotubes. Suddenly your final material is substantially lower mass.
Anything else on your mind?
Plastics recycling has been a big one; however, the system as a whole feels somewhat broken. The plastic recycling system and its logistics infrastructure were built with the best of intentions, but are quite flawed. If you look at aluminum or glass, it comes together very neatly, but also breaks down in a similar way. We are able to use and reuse and have multiple life spans out of glass and aluminum. Plastic, however, rarely shares that same property. As incredible as this materials revolution has been, at the end of the day, our plastics still don’t recycle as well as they should. A plastic can only be recycled so many times before it starts to mechanically fail. What has been recycled can end up with a second lifespan as another product, but some of those processes make the plastics unable to be recycled a second time. I would love to see plastics that are easier to break down to their constituent parts, so that they could be recycled time and again like glass and aluminum.
The other thing I spend a good deal thinking about is, and it might be a question for my peers or the next generation of scientists, is what happens to plastics in the more distant future? What happens when the transition is complete, and our electricity comes from strictly renewable sources, and our cars run on green hydrogen or are fully electric? When gas is either impossible to come by or downright illegal? Where will the raw materials for plastics come from? All the polypropylene and polyethylene – the building blocks of every other plastic – is sourced from oil. Energy is not the only sector that is dependent on fossil fuels, and making an entirely new material that will go into everything in our lives will not be an easy task. It is also not one that I have any clear path forward on myself, but I am incredibly optimistic about it: that we will rise to the challenge and exceed my wildest dreams.
