Instead of bashing, bending and cutting material the way it always has been, 3D printers build things by depositing material, layer by layer.
Filter material: layer of fine gravel used in slope stabilization structures that allows water to escape and retains soil particles.
The technology works by building up layer upon layer of material - typically plastic - to build complex solid objects.
But further measurements using a laser and looking for reflections showed that much of the ice is covered with a layer of dark material tens of centimetres thick.
These printers use something like a toothpaste tube of plastic or other material held vertically in an X-Y plotter that squirts out thin layers of tiny dots of material that build up, layer by layer, to produce a 3D replica of the computer-generated design.
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To enable this material to store electrical energy, two layers of woven fibres are made into a sandwich, separated by a thin layer of a glass-based insulating material.
"The rigid material becomes a structure and the other layer is the force that can start bending and twisting it, " said Mr Tibbits.
Nanogate takes a material to be coated, applies a layer of adhesive nanoparticles and then adds another layer of non-adhesive nanoparticles that bind to the first layer.
Gallium-nitride is manmade and not found in nature, and historically, LEDs are made by growing a gallium-nitride layer on top of a base material, which is typically sapphire or, more recently, silicon carbide.
It combines a strand of standard plastic with a layer made from a "smart" material that can absorb water.
For instance, electroplating can be used to coat a thin layer of gold on to a cheap piece of material.
The most promising sail material has a carbon-fibre backing coated with a thin layer (just a few tens of atoms thick) of aluminium.
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OLETs rely on three layers of material, with the bottom layers carrying a charge, the middle layer (the meat in this high-tech sandwich) emitting photons when excited by the bottom, and the top layer selectively letting those photos through.
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The goal was to substitute photoreceptors with a light-sensitive material capable of restoring photosensitivity to the retina, by easing down the retina on a layer of organic photovoltaic semiconductor.
Because smart skins are grown by depositing layer upon layer, the base coating can be used as a foundation for adding other ingredients to tailor the material's properties for specific purposes.
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