Printing the impossible: Chris Williams and the future of additive manufacturing

I run a lab called the DREAMS Lab, short for Design Research and Education for Additive Manufacturing Systems. And that lab is all focused on additive manufacturing, which is commonly referred to as 3D printing. As a kid, I loved making things or at least aspiring to make things. I had also gotten really excited about computers - that was new at the time - and programming computers. At a high school class, actually, I finished a homework early and the instructor just said, well, you know, I've got this new machine where you can actually use computer coding to actually create parts, let the robot make a part. And it was just in the early days of a little machining tool, and I was just in love with this idea that this work I could do through computer programing could all of a sudden start making real parts. Fast forward to undergraduate, the instructor in a design class, uncrated the university's first ever 3D printer. The instructor gave us a homework assignment. He basically uncrated this machine and wanted us to use it, but didn't quite know how. And the homework assignment he gave us was, print something impossible, which is still something I joke... I still am trying to solve that homework problem to this day. And so that was a really inspiring challenge. It just captured my attention immediately. But every day we come to this lab thinking, how can we print something impossible? That homework problem was so formative in my development and my education that it's the same homework assignment I give to my students. So this is the second piece I ever printed. It's essentially a part of a little machine we had to build, which was a little monorail system. So it just followed a pipe, a really simple shape. But the idea at the time, this is 1997, that I could, in one afternoon, design a part on a computer and have it in my hands by that evening was just brand new and remarkable. So I hold on to this piece to remind me of that heritage, but also to remind me that the things that we make stay around for quite a while. So there are two main reasons why this career is so important to me. One is satisfying my own curiosity about what can be made possible. My favorite part of this job are the students that graduate from Virginia Tech, that go on to do amazing things with what they've learned. The value of the university doing research is to look at the future, where maybe the return on investment is not happening tomorrow, like you needed a company, but at a university, we have the freedom to explore completely novel ideas like the one behind me where we're using advanced robotics. Our early results show that we can actually improve the strength of a printed part by ten times, by using this new form of 3D printing. Additive manufacturing is a really critical technology because it provides access to new products, new shapes of products that improve functionality, whether that's cars or airplanes or rockets or even our own health. You know, a lot of people wear custom fitting clear braces. Those are all made possible through additive manufacturing. But on the everyday basis, we should acknowledge that this technology presents a means to bring manufacturing closer to home. And in some cases, it literally means our own homes. Fundamentally, this technology allows us to do this. It allows all the people in the world access to the ability to turn their idea into a real physical object, whether that's to solve their hyper local problem or to start their own company. So at Virginia Tech, we've invented not just new materials for printing, but the fundamental understanding of what makes a material printable, and using that to allow others to invent brand new materials, whether they're soft rubbers or really conductive metal inks that we can print circuits with. I mean, any material you can think of. We're trying to find a way to 3D printed, and that's actually the core of our research in our lab.