3-D Sugar Printer

Well, the people at Evil Mad Scientist Lab-
oratories have come up with something pretty sweet--a 3-D sugar printer. I have always thought that three dimensional printers are very cool and I even remember the first time that I even learned that they exist--on my tour of the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois.

The basic concept of the 3-D sugar printer follows standard solid freeform fabrication techniques. Simple two dimensional layers are stacked on top of each other to form a more complex 3-D form. So how do the Evil Mad Scientists do this with sugar? First, a layer of low melting "granular printing media" (sugar) is placed on a flat surface. By applying a technique called selective hot air sintering and melting, a burst of hot air is applied to the sugar in preselected locations. As the sugar melts, it fuses together with other sugar grains and eventually a two dimensional image appears. Next, the flat surface is lowered slightly and a second layer of sugar is sprinkled on top. Again hot air from a heat gun is applied to the surface in preselected locations. This time the new two dimensional image that is formed is also attached to any overlapping fused spots in the underneath layer. Repeating this process over and over again eventually yields a three dimensional object made completely out of sugar!

The inventors claim that their production process is very similar to selective laser sintering (SLS), but at a fraction of the cost. SLS is commonly utilized in manufacturing and uses a very expensive high power CO₂ laser (thousands of dollars), whereas the Evil Mad Scientists' technology only needs hot air from a $10 heating element.

If you are really interested, you can visit the CandyFab project, which has all the information you need to build one of these machines at home for yourself. Now I'm hungry--anyone up for some caramelized almonds?