Precision cooking for printed foods via multiwavelength lasers | Hacker News Reader

Precision cooking for printed foods via multiwavelength lasers

nature.com

55 pointssohkamyung18 comments

Of course, not on this level but, a few weeks ago I was invited to see an astonishing 3D confection printer in action. It was printing a fantasy-looking cityscape to top a custom cake. I couldn't really talk to anyone about the technology as the operator was behind a glass partition but it looked as though it was full color using, I'll guess, some sort of spun sugar filament system.

The geometric resolution was incredible, and it was very fast (and looked very expensive).

I'd wanted a laser on a 3D printer years ago, to heat a spot on the layer below just ahead of laying new filament. 3D filament printing is, after all, welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which never works well. Not much laser power, just 1-2 watts. Might be able to fix the "weaker in the layering direction" problem.

That's a neat idea. Somebody did this [1]. Not sure if it's worth the effort to achieve 20% strength increase, but potentially with some fine tuning this could probably allow lower extraction temperature and more flexibility with shape / more precise prints. Likely still not comparable SLA.

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2504-4494/5/4/115/pdf

That's new. Work in 2021. Interesting.

They're vague about the laser power. Also, they only had one laser in a fixed position, so they could only print in one direction, moving towards the laser. You probably need something like 3 lasers, 120 degrees apart, switched so that the energy is always being applied ahead of the filament.

If this increased the range of easily printable materials, it would be quite useful.

With (laser or traditional) welding of metals it gets to the point where you need to flood the area with shielding gases (eg. argon/helium/nitrogen) during the weld to prohibit poor surface qualities (due to plasma formation, oxidation, etc), and that the flow rate requirement and geometric matching of the airflow-assist structure ('shoe') becomes critical (sometimes on both sides). Basically, a generic solution has severe limitations in material, speed and finish terms. I am no chemist but would generally assume the same to be true for many food related substances. Polymers bonding will often respond better to a mix of focused ultrasonics and pressure than simply thermal energy. Alternative, use glue.

It can be welding a hot thing to a cold thing, but if you dial in the layer height and print speed, the heat from the hotend is going to partially melt the area being printed on, resulting in a solid bond. Maintaining a heated enclosure and print bed makes this easier, and eliminates all (or almost all) the warps, layering gaps, and pockets.

Slower, smaller layers means more layers and more time per layer. It then becomes a tradeoff of part strength vs print time. Infill selection and parameters let you dial that in after you get layer bonding and temperature set up.

Printing solid transparent filament parts is done this way.

Adding a laser would accomplish the same thing, but would still require slower speeds and the enclosure to prevent warping.

This is so cool, I hope technology like this can be used in the future to make tasty things that are actually healthy for you, for example by controlling the surface area of certain flavors and suppressing others while providing all the essential amino acids and nutrients.

With existing technology we can already make a lot of tasty things that are actually healthy for you. It doesn't take precision technology to cook a steak with broccoli.

This is true, but with the obesity crisis, clearly there is a need for something that tastes as good as fast food and is as cheap but that is actually good for you…

Obesity crisis seems to be caused in large part by environmental factors and genetics and not by personal habits.

The food we eat is a major environmental factor. Genetics plays some roll, but probably not enough to account for a 5000% rise in 75 years out of the 100,000 year existence of modern humans.

Hey, this is pretty interesting, you can sear food with a laser with good control over how deep the heating penetrates. This could be good for ‘torching’ fragile proteins like seafood.

It’ll probably only be used for some highly processed frankenfood however.

It lacks a section where they ask a group of people to test and judge the result.

This is the funniest explanation I've seen. https://twitter.com/tiktokinvestors/status/14001074532415160...

Literally, why?

An exaggerated, crafted thing for human enjoyment, with no other purpose than that. Like art, or music, or porn, but with food.

Being able to precisely texture printed edibles makes imitation meat texturing better, or can enable entirely new arrangements of flavor and texture. If you could make vegan printed food more palatable, that's a win, but even if it just makes fancy novelties, that's fine too. Life is mostly bullshit, so take enjoyment wherever you can

“ Life is mostly bullshit, so take enjoyment wherever you can” actually true, sometimes my engineer thinking is over critical with things. In the end we are bunch of organisms flying through the galaxy on a giant wet rock.

So that your ground cricket flour looks more appetizing post climate change disaster.

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