Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid metal

MIT researchers have developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes.

Their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure.

Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid metal

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The researchers say LMP is at least 10 times faster than a comparable metal additive manufacturing process, and the procedure to heat and melt the metal is more efficient than some other methods.

The technique does sacrifice resolution for speed and scale. While it can print components that are larger than those typically made with slower additive techniques, and at a lower cost, it cannot achieve high resolutions.

For instance, parts produced with LMP would be suitable for some applications in architecture, construction, and industrial design, where components of larger structures often don’t require extremely fine details. It could also be utilized effectively for rapid prototyping with recycled or scrap metal.

In a recent study, the researchers demonstrated the procedure by printing aluminum frames and parts for tables and chairs which were strong enough to withstand postprint machining. They showed how components made with LMP could be combined with high-resolution processes and additional materials to create functional furniture.

“This is a completely different direction in how we think about metal manufacturing that has some huge advantages. It has downsides, too. But most of our built world — the things around us like tables, chairs, and buildings — doesn’t need extremely high resolution. Speed and scale, and also repeatability and energy consumption, are all important metrics,” says Skylar Tibbits, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab, who is senior author of a paper introducing LMP.

Tibbits is joined on the paper by lead author Zain Karsan SM ’23, who is now a PhD student at ETH Zurich; as well as Kimball Kaiser SM ’22 and Jared Laucks, a research scientist and lab co-director. The research was presented at the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture Conference and recently published in the association’s proceedings.

Significant speedup

One method for printing with metals that is common in construction and architecture, called wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), is able to produce large, low-resolution structures, but these can be susceptible to cracking and warping because some portions must be remelted during the printing process.

LMP, on the other hand, keeps the material molten throughout the process, avoiding some of the structural issues caused by remelting.

Drawing on the group’s previous work on rapid liquid printing with rubber, the researchers built a machine that melts aluminum, holds the molten metal, and deposits it through a nozzle at high speeds. Large-scale parts can be printed in just a few seconds, and then the molten aluminum cools in several minutes.

“Our process rate is really high, but it is also very difficult to control. It is more or less like opening a faucet. You have a big volume of material to melt, which takes some time, but once you get that to melt, it is just like opening a tap. That enables us to print these geometries very quickly,” Karsan explains.

The team chose aluminum because it is commonly used in construction and can be recycled cheaply and efficiently.

Bread loaf-sized pieces of aluminum are deposited into an electric furnace, “which is basically like a scaled-up toaster,” Karsan adds. Metal coils inside the furnace heat the metal to 700 degrees Celsius, slightly above aluminum’s 660-degree melting point.

The aluminum is held at a high temperature in a graphite crucible, and then molten material is gravity-fed through a ceramic nozzle into a print bed along a preset path. They found that the larger the amount of aluminum they could melt, the faster the printer can go.

“Molten aluminum will destroy just about everything in its path. We started with stainless steel nozzles and then moved to titanium before we ended up with ceramic. But even ceramic nozzles can clog because the heating is not always entirely uniform in the nozzle tip,” Karsan says.

By injecting the molten material directly into a granular substance, the researchers don’t need to print supports to hold the aluminum structure as it takes shape. 

Perfecting the process

They experimented with a number of materials to fill the print bed, including graphite powders and salt, before selecting 100-micron glass beads. The tiny glass beads, which can withstand the extremely high temperature of molten aluminum, act as a neutral suspension so the metal can cool quickly.

“The glass beads are so fine that they feel like silk in your hand. The powder is so small that it doesn’t really change the surface characteristics of the printed object,” Tibbits says.

The amount of molten material held in the crucible, the depth of the print bed, and the size and shape of the nozzle have the biggest impacts on the geometry of the final object.

For instance, parts of the object with larger diameters are printed first, since the amount of aluminum the nozzle dispenses tapers off as the crucible empties. Changing the depth of the nozzle alters the thickness of the metal structure.

To aid in the LMP process, the researchers developed a numerical model to estimate the amount of material that will be deposited into the print bed at a given time.

Because the nozzle pushes into the glass bead powder, the researchers can’t watch the molten aluminum as it is deposited, so they needed a way to simulate what should be going on at certain points in the printing process, Tibbits explains.

They used LMP to rapidly produce aluminum frames with variable thicknesses, which were durable enough to withstand machining processes like milling and boring. They demonstrated a combination of LMP and these post-processing techniques to make chairs and a table composed of lower-resolution, rapidly printed aluminum parts and other components, like wood pieces.

Moving forward, the researchers want to keep iterating on the machine so they can enable consistent heating in the nozzle to prevent material from sticking, and also achieve better control over the flow of molten material. But larger nozzle diameters can lead to irregular prints, so there are still technical challenges to overcome.

“If we could make this machine something that people could actually use to melt down recycled aluminum and print parts, that would be a game-changer in metal manufacturing. Right now, it is not reliable enough to do that, but that’s the goal,” Tibbits says.

“At Emeco, we come from the world of very analog manufacturing, so seeing the liquid metal printing creating nuanced geometries with the potential for fully structural parts was really compelling,” says Jaye Buchbinder, who leads business development for the furniture company Emeco and was not involved with this work. “The liquid metal printing really walks the line in terms of ability to produce metal parts in custom geometries while maintaining quick turnaround that you don’t normally get in other printing or forming technologies. There is definitely potential for the technology to revolutionize the way metal printing and metal forming are currently handled.”

Unlocking history with geology and genetics

Unlocking history with geology and genetics

Fatima Husain grew up in the heart of the Midwest, surrounded by agriculture. “Every time you left your home, you saw fields of corn and soybeans. And it was really quite beautiful,” she says. During elementary school, she developed her own love of gardening and cultivated a small plot in her family’s backyard.

“Having the freedom to make a mess, experiment, and see things grow was very impactful,” says Husain, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and a Hugh Hampton Young Fellow. This experimentation in the garden was the seed that blossomed into her fascination with science. “When you think about gardening and agriculture in Iowa,” she says, “you think about soil and its origins, which led me to geology and geochemistry and all these interdisciplinary fields that play a role in the Earth sciences.”

Husain has maintained that scientific curiosity throughout her academic career. As a graduate student in EAPS’ Program in Geology, Geochemistry, and Geobiology, she studies the fossil and genetic records of ancient and modern life forms to better understand the history of life on Earth. She says, “Twenty years ago, I was a stoked kid working with topsoil in Iowa. Now, I get to work with ancient dirt and sediments to better understand Earth and life’s past.” 

Sharing science

Though Husain loved her environmental science class in high school, when she enrolled at Brown University, she wasn’t sure which STEM major to pursue. Then, a guest lecture in her first-year biology course dispelled any uncertainty. “A professor walked on stage and introduced himself as a biogeochemist, and after that, everything just clicked,” she says. Within weeks of that fateful lecture, she had declared a major in geochemistry. “I’ve never looked back,” she says.

She then immersed herself in her Earth science classes, which applied the core science disciplines she studied to topics such as the oceans, weather and climate, and water quality. “I gained a sincere appreciation for the excellent teaching and writing that helped me access the world of the geosciences,” she says, “And that helped me realize the value in communicating science clearly.”

To hone her writing skills, Husain took nonfiction writing classes as her electives and joined one of the school newspapers. There, she took on the role of science writer and editor. As she neared graduation, she knew that she would eventually pursue geochemistry at the graduate level, but first she wanted to focus on journalism and writing. She reasoned that, if she could formally learn the fundamentals of science writing and reporting, then “I could more effectively share all the science I learned after that point,” she says. With the support of her undergraduate professors, she decided to apply to MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, one of the only such programs in the country.

The program refined Husain’s writing skills and paved the way for her to pursue science journalism opportunities across a variety of media, including print, video, podcasting, and radio. She worked as a writing intern for MIT News during this time, and has written a number of MIT News articles while at MIT. After graduating, she served as a Curiosity Correspondent for the MIT-Nord Anglia Education Collaboration based at the MIT Museum. In that role, she says, “I worked on communicating the amazing science happening here at MIT to K-12 students around the world via educational videos.” Since beginning her PhD studies, Husain has transitioned to a new role in the collaboration — hosting a monthly webinar series called MIT Abstracts, which connects MIT researchers and experts with an international audience of middle schoolers.

Along the way, Husain has also worked as a reporter and managing producer for a Rhode Island-based sustainability science radio show called Possibly. In 2019, she founded a podcast with her colleagues called BIOmarkers, which serves as an oral history project for the discipline of organic geochemistry.

Acquiring the “biggest tool set” possible

After completing her master’s thesis, Husain began to return to her roots in geochemistry. She says, “At some point, when I was interviewing other scientists and they described their experiments, I’d miss being in the lab myself. That feeling helped me realize the time was right to get back into research.” Husain chose to stay at MIT for her PhD. “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to continue working on challenging, interdisciplinary problems within such an exciting environment,” she says. “There really is no other place quite like it.”

She joined the lab group of Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology. For her first project as a research assistant, Husain helped then-postdoc Ainara Sistiaga reconstruct the environment of Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge 1.7 million years into the past, using molecule-scale fossils preserved in archeological sediments. Part of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, the site preserves evidence of ancient hominin tools and activities. The research team’s findings were later published in published in PNAS.

Under the mentorship of her advisors, Gregory Fournier, an associate professor of geobiology, and Summons, Husain studies both the fossil record and the genetic records of organisms alive today to answer fundamental questions about life’s evolution on Earth. “The farther back into Earth’s history we go, the fewer complete records we have,” Husain says, “To answer the questions that arise, I hope to employ the biggest tool set I can.”

Currently, Husain investigates the biomarkers of microbes living in Antarctic biofilms, which she hopes will provide hints about the types of places where the ancestors of complex life sheltered during global glaciation events through Earth’s Cryogenian period, which stretched between 720 to 635 million years ago. To do this, Husain applies techniques from chemistry, such as chromatography and mass spectrometry, to isolate and study microbial lipids, the precursors of molecular fossils preserved in the geologic record.

Husain also uses “molecular clocks,” tools which employ the genetic sequences of living organisms to estimate when in evolutionary time different species diverged, to better understand how long ago aerobic respiration arose on Earth. Using the growing databases of publicly available gene sequences, Husain says it’s possible to track the histories of metabolisms that arose billions of years ago in Earth’s past. Much of her research can also be applied to astrobiology, the study of potential life elsewhere in the universe.

As a PhD student, Husain has also had the opportunity to serve as teaching assistant for 12.885 (Science, Politics, and Environmental Policy) for two semesters. In that role, she says, “My goal is to help students improve their writing skills so that they are equipped to successfully communicate about important issues in science and policy in the future.”

Looking ahead, Husain hopes to continue applying both her science and communication skills to challenging problems related to Earth and the environment. Along the way, she knows that she wants to share the opportunities that she had with others. “Whichever form it takes,” she says, “I hope to play a role in cultivating the same types of supportive environments which have led me here.”  

Give Us Feedback For A Chance To Win A Game Informer Gold Copy Of The Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Issue

Give Us Feedback For A Chance To Win A Game Informer Gold Copy Of The Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Issue

For every issue of Game Informer magazine, we print a handful of Game Informer Gold editions. These versions sometimes feature alternate art, have a gold embossed logo on the front, are individually numbered and feature higher quality paper. They’re very nice, and we reserve them for special occasions like charity auctions or, as is the case here, giveaways.

For the recent Final Fantasy VII Rebirth issue featuring both Cloud and Sephiroth awash in an ocean of flame, we have two Game Informer Gold editions we are prepared to send to readers. For a chance at winning one of these collectible issues, we want to hear from you about what’s on your mind about gaming and Game Informer. Send a message to our Feedback for a chance to be featured in our monthly magazine letters column.

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Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review – Passing The Torch – Game Informer

By the time I saw the credits on Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I felt like I had been through the emotional ringer. I was mentally exhausted. I think that’s by design. Infinite Wealth is developer Ryu Ga Gotoku’s (RGG) most ambitious project by a long shot – an epic tale told across multiple characters and continents, featuring the conclusion of some nearly 20-year-old plot threads that leave at least one character, quite literally and relatably, asleep in the streets. Some of this is the best work the developer has ever done, a new watermark for the series going forward. And some of it is some of the studio’s worst. Like everything in Infinite Wealth, it’s complicated.  

Infinite Wealth picks up a few years after the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon and continues the story of dual-series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, a former yakuza who’s now taken up work trying to help rehabilitate other yakuza members back into society by finding them jobs. By the laws of narrative, this goes horribly wrong, and it’s not long before Ichiban and friends, who now all find themselves out of work, are back in the folds of the criminal underworld. After the dissolution of the nation’s two biggest families, the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance, in the previous game, the Seiryu Clan reigns supreme in Yokohama’s Ijincho district. The group is not only working on its own dissolution program and trying to give former yakuza work, but it also has information on Ichiban’s long-lost mother, Akane. He just needs to go to Hawaii to find her.

Once in Hawaii, Ichiban quickly runs into his counterpart and former star of the show Kiryu Kazuma. Kiryu plays a much larger role in this game than in Like a Dragon before it – mainly because he’s also a playable character. Ichiban and Kiryu being playable in the same game represents a passing of the torch of sorts, and I truly love the time I got to spend with Kiryu. He’s an old man now with cancer and a few months to live. He’s coming to terms with his life, and Infinite Wealth goes a long way in softening and humanizing him. I always felt that letting Kiryu live after the events of Yakuza 6, where he faked his death, was the wrong call. This game reckons with that idea a lot, and even if I’m not totally sold on where it ends up, I like the road it takes to get there a lot.

The dual protagonists also give the cast the chance to expand and breathe. At one point in the story, Kiryu and a small team of characters from the previous game return to Japan, leaving Ichiban with a cast of mostly new characters. The game jumps back and forth between the two, allowing tons of time to get to know everyone. I especially love newcomers Chitose and Tomizawa and never skipped a moment to learn more about the central cast. 

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review – Passing The Torch – Game Informer

Moving a bulk of the game’s story to Hawaii allows RGG to open up its narrative potential. No longer confined to just Japan, the studio aims common issues facing America today – including further criticisms of the treatment of the unhoused and sex workers, something it examined in Japan in previous games. America’s corrupt police state gets especially harsh criticism as we see how the police abuse its position to exploit common citizens and foreigners and ignore its roles within society. The Yakuza/Like a Dragon series has always been political, and RGG has always been very opinionated. While the studio hasn’t always stuck the landing, Infinite Wealth reinforces how the studio is insistent on tackling these concepts. Seeing a studio successfully approaching these issues with maturity is incredibly refreshing. 

That’s not to say this game isn’t still about the yakuza. Infinite Wealth pulls from the real-world laws against former members of Japanese crime families. It examines whether or not they’re actually useful means of rehabilitation while also looking at the ways these groups can be easily exploited by those in power. Kiryu, as a character, beautifully fits this narrative hook. He is a criminal, after all; for all the good he’s done, his past is full of darkness. Ichiban, too. What does it mean to reintroduce criminals into society, rehabilitate them, allow them to be sorry, and offer them forgiveness? What does it mean to let these people live normal lives again, and will society ever actually allow that? The best moments of Infinite Wealth are when these questions are called into focus, and I was constantly surprised at the empathy and nuance RGG showed throughout the story.

But it takes some pretty spectacular stumbles on the way to that greatness. Much of the Hawaii plotline revolves around the Palekana religious cult, which Akane is a member of, and its figurehead, Bryce Fairchild. For all the nuance and thought put into its real-world topics, the game’s portrayal of cults and religious fanaticism is laughable at best and completely superfluous at worst. Bryce is certainly evil; it’s just that he’s evil in a way with no depth. RGG has gone to great lengths to humanize its villains and give meanings to their actions – and the other antagonists of Infinite Wealth have loads of interesting motives. But not Bryce. He’s just a bad guy. And a boring one at that. The game is all too quick to shove the Palekana story aside, including characters it spent dozens of hours building up to focus on other topics. Almost like the game itself knows it isn’t very good. It’s unfortunate because this plotline is stacked against some of the best moments in the series.

Unfortunate, too, is how that story is delivered. As usual, Infinite Wealth features some of the best acting in the entire game industry – most of the time. A lot of the Japanese talent behind the main cast is incredible, especially newcomers such as Satoru Iguchi, of King Gnu fame, who plays Tomizawa. His entire arc is wonderfully realized, moving, and funny. On the other hand, other characters fall entirely flat. For example, Bryce is written to be fluent in both Japanese and English. His Japanese is great. His English sounds like someone reading the words out phonetically in a different language. In fact, many of the American characters are clearly voiced by actors struggling to deliver their English lines. Switching to the English VO doesn’t help much either, as the main cast feels awful when contrasted against who they are as people – with the exception of maybe Danny Trejo’s character. The voice acting is full of odd choices such as this that, depending on the character, can really pull you out of the moment.

Luckily, Infinite Wealth’s gameplay is often stellar across the board. As always, it’s a joy to explore RGG’s open worlds, and the three here – Kamurocho, Ijincho, and Honolulu – are all fantastic. Honolulu, especially, has a completely different vibe than other RGG worlds, and I loved exploring its bright beaches, seedy back streets, and luxurious hotel districts. Taking Kiryu back to the streets of Kamurocho is wonderfully nostalgic, too, and Infinite Wealth wastes no time letting him reminisce and enjoy his old haunts. I spent so much time taking Kiryu to places from the old games, loving how much thought went into how we would react.

You spend the vast majority of your time as you do in any other RGG game: beating the holy hell out of dudes in the street. Infinite Wealth continues Like a Dragon’s change to turn-based combat, and the updates here make for a surprisingly deep and engaging system. Including directional and combo attacks adds interesting layers to how you approach an enemy. Exploiting an enemy’s weakness and, in turn, having multiple members of your party dynamically attack the same foe in one turn consistently feels great. And I was always excited to see what new whacky animations I’d see when getting new magic attacks. 

Infinite Wealth’s job system – effectively how you change character classes and a returning mechanic from the previous game – creates a ton of interesting team line-ups, and I really enjoyed experimenting and building out as well-rounded a party as I could. Upgrading your job level also allows you to import skills from other jobs, leading to some truly dynamic characters with various elemental attacks. That said, while I do love combat, grinding out levels in the game’s dungeon was a real chore at times – boring, monotonous, and took way too long for its own good.

Your mileage will vary with the game’s unbelievable amount of side content. Infinite Wealth surprised me with its substories, which I’ve historically never really enjoyed in other games. Here, I found some of them deeply funny (there’s one about a dating app that’s great) and well-thought-out. I also enjoyed a lot of the mini-games, such as the Crazy Taxi-inspired food delivery game and finding all the optional conversations and character links. However, I did not enjoy the Animal Crossing-inspired Dondoko Island or the Pokémon-like collecting and fighting games, which I found incredibly dull and convoluted. Luckily, they are optional after their introduction, but that intro grinds the game to a halt so it can slowly explain all the various rules and mechanics. There are plenty of other side activities I didn’t have time to even touch, and I imagine there are easily 100-plus hours of the game for the most dedicated. Some of it’s pretty dang good. I just hope I never have to go back to Dondoko Island ever again.

Infinite Wealth is a swing for the fences for RGG. At one point, the Yakuza series was a cult classic relegated to small fanbases outside of Japan. That changed in 2017 when Yakuza 0 finally hit it big. By the time Yakuza: Like a Dragon came out in 2020, it was clear RGG had a phenomenon on its hands. The result of that success is a massive game brimming with things to do and say. Sometimes, it’s too much. There’s a version of Infinite Wealth that leaves a lot on the cutting room floor and saves itself loads of tedium. There were so many hours that I wished that was the game I was playing instead.

And yet, I can’t help but be amazed by what it does pull off over its impressively long run-time. It’s rare to see a triple-A video game have anything worthwhile to say about the need for criminal rehabilitation, the police state, and even nuclear disposal. Somehow, this game has all those topics and smart (albeit somewhat surface-level) things to say about them. I’m shocked that its combat system consistently felt new and fresh after 60 hours and that I was finding new ways to use it. That it gave me so much time with some of my favorite characters in video games, allowing me to know them so much deeper than I ever knew before, was just the cherry on top.  

In one of the final moments of Infinite Wealth, one of the characters falls exhausted into the street, beaten down by everything that just came before. As he does so, he looks satisfied and happy, even though arguably nothing is going right for him at that moment. In a lot of ways, I felt the exact same by the end of the game. I was tired. And yet, I was also ready to see what this crew would get up to next.