January VLog

Hello everybody who knows my Blogger account. This is my second VLog and this one is a Youtube video courtesy of the Youtuber Travis William. This video is an informational video about the 3-D printing process and so I have chosen it for my VLog so you can all see how the process works. 

Enjoy. 

But Will It Fly...?

But will it fly... I mean will it taste good?

3-D printing food could be the future...But will it?

Sure it looks good, and it isn't impossible (to a certain extent) but what people really look for in food is one component: TASTE. Can 3-D printed food actually taste good? This is the question we have hanging in the air.

Now some people here know the Spongebob Squarepants episode where Spongebob turns into Spongebob Normalpants to impress Squidward and that affected his work. If you knew the episode, Spongebob ended up printing out Krabby Patties from his computer because it was a more "normal" thing to do. The Krabby Patties ended up tasting like paper, though, giving birth to a potential stereotype (meaning one of the questions asked to me from my friend about 3-D printing food was "Wouldn't that taste like paper?").

Not at all, actually.

3-D printed foods have the potential to taste good. Even though you have to actually provide the inkjet with the ingredients, such as sugars or meat, once fed through the inkjet, the printer can print the object requested, with any material. The options have limits, but now, chefs and scientists alike are experimenting using more unique materials, a focus I heard being purees to make solid foods, such as carrots, and some fruits, using various temperatures to make the material stiffen and become edible.

The only thing is that the printer can't make the foods from scratch, but 3-D printer manufacturers will be working on making advanced computer technology to be able to solve the problem, but for now, it is still very cool (and tastes good).

But how exactly is 3-D printed FOOD made?

But how exactly is 3-D printed FOOD possible?

Let's put this out there...the idea to 3-D print food.

Granted it surely looks cool, but what it really has to come down to is the factor of the taste of the foods produced by the 3-D printer. My blog today is about the way 3-D printers can print foods with edible outcomes.

At this point in time, scientists and chefs alike are dabbling in the field of edible foods from 3-D printers. The idea though started way back in 2007 when the students of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York developed a patent of the Fab@Home 3-D printer. The patent was successful and got the 2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award. In a bit of time, some of the students started tinkering with their invention, replacing the powdery substance for the inkjet with other materials such as Cheese Whiz, Nutella and frosting. "You can extrude about anything through the inkjet" says Jeffrey Lipton, a Ph.D at the university.

The options for 3-D printing food, though are quite limited. A major obstacle for 3-D printing food, tends to be the various ingredients in more complex foods, animal meat such as steak, sausages or burger patties being an example because of the materials being very resource-intensive. It would be much easier to make a steak out of algae through an inkjet than using cow protein.

3-D printing food has it's limits, but is still a very cool subject in itself. My next blog post will just be about more ways of 3-D printing food, looking into the cartridge systems. 

The Process of 3-D printing

The Process of 3-D printing

3-D printing an object comprises of many steps, a lot of them involved with the computer connected to the 3-D printer. True, but no matter what type of material you are using to 3-D print, or the printer itself, 3-D printers always follow the same basic steps.

Today's blog is about the many steps the computer uses to manipulate the inkjet to print an object.

The process starts with creating a 3-D printed blueprint on the computer screen using a CAD (computer aided design) software. Once the blueprint is created, the printer needs to be prepared.

Preparing the printer means refilling the raw materials (e.g. plastics and binding solutions) and preparing the building platform. Once you hit print, the machine starts working away, building the object you want with the materials given.

Once done printing, the object goes through a bit of post-processing, the things to do ranging from un-sticking the object to the base of the printer to brushing off excess powder.

Once all that is done, the object is complete, the object in this case being food since I will be studying that. On that note, my next blog will be about how the printer can make food, specifically focusing on the food flavors. Until that, goodbye for now.