February VLog

February VLog

My VLog for the month of February is about my recent findings of 3-D printing facts. This one is about 3-D printed food hitting shelves in hitting shelves in various countries! Wow. Hope you enjoy, whoever is watching.

3-D printing's Commercial Uses

3-D Printing and it's Commercial Uses: Softer, Easy-to-Chew Foods 

Because 3-D printing is only starting to be known by people and the printing abilities are vague and still need exploration, you never know what you are going to get, especially from my blogs. This blog post can be surprising to some people because of 3-D printing foods being in close contact with healthcare. Awesome.

In my early stages of research on 3-D printing, I was only looking up how 3-D printing works not the benefits of 3-D printing food for society and I'm sorry because my topic is how 3-D printing food could solve world famine problems.

It is known that not all people could eat some of the foods we do. And this blog is a close up of how 3-D printing food helped stop the elderly in some retirement homes from going hungry.

All of the early examples of 3-D printed foods such as the ones you see when looking them up on Google have all used simple, processed, single-ingredient pastes, powders and purees. Nobody is able to manufacture something complex as let's say a burger with all the fixings. Cobbling together all necessary ingredients and structures to make the food has been a bit too much of a challenge so far.

A researcher at the TNO or the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research named Kjeld van Bommel realized this matter. So rather than reinventing an organic object, van Bommel says that they will create personalized novel consumable foods with personalized nutritional content.


To that end, his group at the TNO is researching 3-D printing food to help seniors who are suffering from dysphagia and have trouble chewing and swallowing food. Their meals are given to them. These people get their meals in an unsightly and unappealing mush of pureed chicken and broccoli for example leading to appetite loss and malnourishment. Van Bommel has a grant from the EU to develop 3-D printed replicas of those foods, only softer and easier to chew.

This concludes my blog. See you in a week or two. Bye for now.

Planning Out the 3-D Printing Food Process

Planning Out the 3-D Food Printing Process

So it is established that 3-D printed food exists and it tastes good, but what happens next with the printer having to manipulate the software for good taste? Let's figure that out.

3-D printing companies are all starting to get more famous each day, while the more well-known NASA are using 3-D technology to make simple meals for the astronauts, which make the food choices in the International Space Station have more variety. Instead of food being sent up 100000
kilometers in the sky, machines are starting to make food supplies less of a hassle for the astronauts.

But how is printing the all planned out? As in: "Hey, printer, cook so-and-so, with blah blah blah on the side, can you do that for me please?"

Simply, it isn't that simple.

See, what has to be done is that a blueprint has to be created first, consisting of the things that you'll need to use to build the object, layer by layer. I think I discussed that the blueprints have to be designed by the computer using a CAD, or computer aided design (see right). The designs are then corrected, if there are malfunctions in the design such as holes. Then the design goes through a piece of software called a "slicer".

The slicer coverts the model into many thin layers by using G-code software. The G-code file can then be printed using 3-D printing client software (which loads the G-code and directs it on what to do).

Typical resolution for 3-D printers describes layer thickness in dots per inch (DPI).The typical layer thickness is about 250 DPI, a bit thinner than paper. The particles in the food are about 500 DPI each.

So it simply goes layer by layer using various materials, copying the CAD, right?

Yup, layer by layer. Wasn't too hard to understand, right?

Well, it looks easier said than done.

Yeah...- WHOOPS! Talking to myself again. Do that a lot. Farewell for now, guys.

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.