A 3D-printed material emits a green glow when friction or pressure is applied to it. One application could be reducing the chances of a fracture when drilling into bone during surgery.
A 3D-printed material that glows when a force is applied to it could be used to better understand how objects break.
Xuhui Xu at the Kunming University of Science and Technology in China and his colleagues have created a material that glows where a force pushes on it.
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| The material glows green under force Songcheng Peng, Ping Xia, Ting Wang et al. |
Similar materials have been made before from compounds called lanthanides, which contain rare-earth elements like lutetium, but they are normally thin and flat. The researchers wanted to make a material thick enough so it would show how forces applied to it in all three spatial dimensions. So they 3D printed such a material with a lanthanide ink.
They printed different structures, like cubes assembled from tiny spheres. They then shined X-rays on the structures, which gives electrons inside the material additional energy. Each structure starts off transparent, but when a force is applied, the electrons emit this energy as a green light in a process called mechanoluminescence.
In one experiment, the team placed a thin disc of the material on a turntable, which rotated the disc while a needle-like instrument applied pressure and friction to its top surface. As the disc spun, it emitted light visible to the naked eye, forming a green circle that looked like it was traced by this instrument.
In another experiment, the researchers 3D printed a solid cube a few centimetres in size and wound a metal screw into it, imitating the way screws are inserted into fractured bones in medicine. Based on how much the material glowed around the screw, they could determine where it was experiencing the most stress and where it might fracture first.
This could be useful for medical procedures where doctors must decide what size of screws to use or whether to pre-drill a hole first. They could test their options on the new material and see which one involves the least mechanical stress.
Philippe Smet at Ghent University in Belgium says that the new material absorbs more energy from the X-rays and emits more intense light than similar past materials, which could make it a more precise indicator of pressures and forces. He says that mechanoluminescence is a good tool for seeing pressures and forces that can cause damage inside of materials. “The idea is pretty intuitive – applying higher pressure leads to more light being emitted so you can visualise the stresses,” he says.
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