NanoVoxel: Taking tiny 3D printing to the next level

“We’re working on new endoscopes which are so small that they can go into the brain or heart.”

In this episode of Third Angle, we explore the world of NanoVoxel, a pioneering company at the forefront of 3D printing innovation. Discover how their advanced technology is transforming micro-manufacturing, from creating intricate micro-parts to prototyping and mass production for those working in the medical world and tech sector.

Founder, Domenico Foglia also talks us through the intricacies of creating a Baby Yoda, the size of a grain of sand - only to be seen through an optical microscope! Each step they take at NanoVoxel pushes the boundaries of what's achievable with creativity. 

Find out more about NanoVoxel here. 

Find out more about OnShape here. 

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. Location recording by Aaron Olsacher. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where Nanovoxel redefines 3D printing.

I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company, PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world. Each powered by PTC technology.

Today, we're diving into the groundbreaking world of nano voxel, a company specializing in two photon polymerization, 3d printing technology, or in other words, 3d printing in miniature. They aim to transform micromanufacturing by replicating parts into silicon molds with unmatched precision. Our producer Aaron visited Nanovoxel's state of the art facilities to meet founder Domenico Foglia.

Hear how their incredible feats of micromanufacturing can create a baby Yoda the size of a grain of sand, or an entire castle crafted on a pencil tip. 

I'm Dominika, I'm the founder of Nanovoxel. Today we are at the three core building.  we are just outside the labs of nano voxel and, , we are ready to show you a little bit of our story here. We just step inside.  our, , main lab is there are the three printing machines. We have, , our laboratory, our microscopes, and this is where most of the magic is happening. You can see, for example, that here the money is working on a cut file. Cut software is a very important part of our of our work because what we normally get from customers needs to be rework.

So the very first step of the, our work is to understand what the customer needs and to adapt it to, to our printing design. And so, so we call it designs for manufacturing and very often we have to modify a little bit to adapt it to our manufacturing capabilities. And so the very first step normally is to analyze the part, , modify it, and then create a so called print file, which can, then we can move to the next step of the printer.

So we are moving. More inside the lab, there is the laboratory. We have Rania working with it. And, ,  these are, , pretty, , advanced equipment because we are working on a scale where standard microscope, for example, do not work anymore, and we had to invest quite good money to have instruments, which are able to measure already what we are creating, because at the moment, what the money is doing is printing parts which are not visible. It's about, , 200 microns. Yeah. And this is what's very exciting here is that we are doing stuff that no one else worldwide is able to do here. We have, for example, , two special microscope. One is so called metallographic microscope because he has to come to resolution where the grain size of metals is possible to recognize.

So it's very, I mean, already a very, very high resolution while on the left side. And you can see this box is, , taken to, , create a hair flow that dust is not coming on the parts. And on the left side, there is, , what we call the, , the LSM, the laser scanning microscope. Which is a special microscope, which is using three different principles, confocal, laser and white light interferometer to,  make super high precision measurements and to create also a 3D scan of these microparts.

And, , normally there are few microscope which are able to create a three dimensional measurement of transparent parts. This you can look inside the microscope and this you can look on the screen. Here we have, ,  This one is a optical microscope. When you watch inside, you can see the microscale of the parts that we have created.

Probably, with naked eyes, you just see a block. But, , if you look inside, you see how, , the microstructure is, , looking like. It's very difficult. For people to understand just the scale of the parts, we have printed, let's say, some small cases, like we have Baby Yoda's different scales. When people see the size of the Baby Yoda, which is smaller than one millimeter, It's like looking like a sand core.

People say I can't believe that. We are now in front of the our vacu , casting, , station where 3D printing is the core of our technology, but actually one of our main competence is not only the 3D printing as a service. But also to replicate the incredible resolution, accuracy, and designs of 3D printing in other processes.

So that we are able to create micro parts also in other materials and at higher productivity. And for example, What, , Karina just did is called vacuum casting, where basically by starting from a geometry, which is called the master, we're able to replicate this part into others, material like a silicone mold.

And for example, these are kind of, , silicone molds.  as you can see, we, they recreate. The geometry is basically a negative of the print. And so after creating this silicone mold, we have a, , replication of what we've been able to do with 3D printing. So what we do here, the core of our, , experience is inside this clean room.

And this is the two photon polymerization machine. This machine is from the company up nano, which actually is in the same building as us is our partner company. We do microfluidics, micro needles, micro nozzles. We create micro parts for mechanicals like micro gears, or for example, there is a strong interest from a different customer in terms of endoscopes because they're getting smaller and smaller to be less invasive inside the body. What we do is, , when we have to run the machine, we have this, , a clean room, but also that, ,  the parts, , that dress is also very important. So, You can see Rania go inside and activate the machine. You can see it's the slide is opening and now what we have to do is loading, , a substrate, which is, , these, ,  it can be of, , 20 per 20 millimeters or 40 per 40 millimeters is a glass substrate.

And it's put on the top and it's emerged then in a photopolymer,  vat, kind of bath. So basically we have a liquid, , photopolymers and, ,  when light is hitting it, it's polymerizing and harden pixels. Are easy to interpretate, but there are two dimensional, so X and Y. Voxel instead is a volumetric pixel.

So we have x, Y, n, Z and incredible of this machine is that it's able to create two polymerize voxel of the size below one micrometer. So the maximal resolution that we have is, , 200 nanometers in X and Y and 500 nanometers in set. And this is allowing incredible stuff like,  up nano, for example, made a project of creating an entire,  castle on a pencil.

You can see here,  this is, , a pencil tip, which has been sharpened as much as possible. And this castle here, , which resembled a real, , castle. Is having feature size down to two three microns and the resolution is unbelievable and you need a Scanning electron microscope to see that because otherwise there would be no chance to see with an optical microscope Maybe you can watch on the screen so as you can see here, um on this printed picture the feature size is, , going down to a few micrometers.

For example, these, , columns here, they have a diameter of five to six microns. And, , I invite everyone to, , look on the search engines about the Castelnau pencil tip because it's a very impressive project. We will go now to the other lab.  because A very important part of our vertical integrated solution

is also the micro injection molding machine and micro injection molding. Here we are also,  we're in front of the micropower injection molding machine of Wittmann, which is probably the most advanced, , in the world. injection molding machine on the market. Martin is our expert of, , micro manufacturing, micro injection molding.

And basically he had the idea and implemented all the steps necessary to be able to make work in this machine. These are processes which are able via 3d printing to create soft or hard tools. to then be able to,  use a microinjection molding machine, which is the standard to create micro parts in high volume.

These machines can go to create, , to produce up to 10 million parts per year, for example. And, , because they are super efficient, super fast. And of course they have a different scale than 3D printing. One of the most exciting things that we are doing at Nanovoxel. is impacting the future life of the people.

We are working on microneedles. We are working on new endoscopes, which can go maybe do analysis of veins because they are so small that they can fit inside that. They can go up to brains or inside the heart. Then, I have a clear view of the impact that we are having, , in this world. Of course, we're not that credible yet because it's a tiny startup.

We have to demonstrate people. And now,  we are exactly expanding, scaling up. We are in the middle of the go to market, , process. And, , we have the luck that there's a, we're a special startup because we do not need. five years or 10 years to go to the market like a lot of medical devices company do.

So we are very enthusiastic about how the things are developing. We already found the next location here in Vienna because we need more space for production.

That was Dominika from Nanovoxel guiding us through the world of micromanufacturing. Now it's time to meet our expert Jon Hirschtick from PTC. Jon, we've heard about Onshape in previous episodes, but in this instance, Nanovoxel credits Onshape with facilitating collaboration and reducing 3D printing time with Boolean tools.

Are you able to explain how this works to our listeners? 

As you've heard, Nanovoxel is a leader in high precision microparts using two photon polymerization, or 2PP. micro 3d printing technology. It combines advanced printing systems with micro injection molding and cavity manufacturing expertise. So all these come together to produce micro and nanometer resolution components.

Nanovoxel, they needed a cloud native flexible solution that would both minimize their IT investment costs and facilitate remote collaboration. Onshape was chosen for its cloud native features. We enable simultaneous editing, real time feedback, efficient collaboration and reduced design time were essential for maintaining productivity and meeting a whole bunch of diverse needs. Onshape's cloud native platform supports simultaneous editing, enabling real time feedback and efficient collaboration among team members, regardless of their location. Now, Boolean refers to a set of operations that can be formed, excuse me, Boolean refers to set operations that can be performed with 3D objects.

adding, subtracting, intersecting, etc. Onshape has really robust Boolean operations that allow for creating complex geometries by combining, subtracting, or intersecting shapes, facilitating the development of intricate and precise micro 3D parts, essential for various high precision applications. Onshape has a unique, multi part modeling environment where it's extremely easy to split or combine geometry into single or multiple parts.

Our flexibility, combined with our powerful Boolean operations, lends itself perfectly to NanoVoxel's process of defining regions with different resolutions. Now, all CAD has Boolean operations, but Onshape has the most powerful multi part environment in our part studio environment. I was amazed to see.

the parts that NanoVoxel is able to print. Now I've seen many 3D printing tools and they're used extensively and most of the time people are making larger scale parts like parts you'd hold in your hand or parts like a machine part, a scale of, of, of many inches or, or, or many centimeters in size. But the nano voxel parts get stunningly small.

They even can print something that looks like a small building, if you look at it under a microscope. But the size of it fits on a tip of a pencil. It's amazing. You can see it on their website. So they're, they're doing things at such a small scale. It's almost unbelievable compared to what I'll call normal size parts that you'd see in most kinds of manufacturing.

We're very proud to see NanoVoxel using Onshape, not only for the,  sort of traditional reasons of Onshape, the cloud native, the savings in time and money. the real time collaboration, but also nano voxel appreciating the geometric modeling power of Onshape. Lets them use the part studio mode, lets them flexibly think about multi part modeling in a way that was not possible with older parametric systems.

Also, powerful Boolean operations and direct editing. Let them get just the precise modeling, , results that they need using a straightforward, clear set of modeling features.

Thanks to Jon for giving us an insight into Onshape and our guest Dominico for showing us firsthand how Nanovoxel's cutting edge 3d printing technology is transforming industries. And also thanks to our producer, Aaron, for taking us on the tour with him. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our bi weekly, third angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts, and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. Location recording by Aaron Olsacher. And music by Rowan Bishop.