Researchers Print Full 3D Shapes in One Shot Using Holographic Light

Printing a Part in Under 8 Seconds

A team of researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated a 3D printing method that produces complete hollow structures in a single laser flash. The technique uses an inverse-designed phase mask to shape laser light into a holographic pattern that cures an entire three-dimensional shape at once. The fastest prints finished in 7.5 seconds.

Conventional resin 3D printing builds objects layer by layer, pulling a cured slice out of a vat before starting the next one. That process is reliable but slow. Digital Light Processing (DLP) and tomographic methods speed things up by projecting whole layers at once, but they still require many exposures to build a part. The Utah/Austin approach eliminates the stacking entirely.

How the Mask Works

The system relies on a custom photopolymer resin and a nanoscale phase mask. The mask diffracts a UV laser beam into a carefully computed 3D intensity pattern. Where the light is bright, the resin crosslinks and hardens. Where the pattern stays dark, the resin remains liquid and can be washed away later. The result is a hollow structure with internal voids that conventional layer-by-layer methods cannot reach in a single pass.

The researchers engineered the resin's absorption profile alongside the mask design. Because light exposure and chemical curing happen at very different timescales, the team could tune the resin to ignore energy in regions meant to stay hollow. That is what lets the printer create internal geometry without blurring the outer surfaces.

What They Built

In demonstrations, the printer produced hollow cylinders and cubes with sub-100 micron features. The work builds on earlier research that made high-aspect-ratio microtubule arrays but could only create voids along the length and width of a part, not through its height. The new resin chemistry and mask design solve that, enabling what the researchers call true 3D hollow structures.

The paper, published on arXiv, describes a throughput of roughly 1 cubic millimeter per second. That is one to two orders of magnitude faster than comparable volumetric methods, according to the authors. The team sees applications in microfluidics, biomedical scaffolds, optical components, and MEMS. A printer that can fabricate complex lattice structures in seconds could change how researchers prototype micro-scale devices.

Where This Could Go

This is a long way from a desktop machine you can buy. The current setup requires a precisely aligned optical system, a custom phase mask fabricated by grayscale lithography, and a resin formulated specifically for this process. Scaling it to larger build volumes will require bigger masks and more powerful lasers. But the throughput numbers are hard to ignore. If the approach can be industrialized, it would represent a fundamental shift in how resin parts are made.

Funding came from the National Science Foundation Future Manufacturing program and the Robert A. Welch Foundation. The research team included collaborators from UT Austin's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Chemistry.