AURORA | Richard Weir’s new toy takes up an entire room in this basement maze of laboratory space at the Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora.
That’s not to say this refurbished 3-D printer belongs to Weir, a research professor in the University of Colorado Denver’s new Department of Bioengineering. The cutting-edge laser metal bonding machine came to the lab thanks to a $600,000 grant from the Veterans Administration, and it’s part of the larger Biomechatronics Development Laboratory that’s home to researchers from CU and the VA.
But the machine, which represents the latest advances in 3-D printing technology, is set to specifically advance Weir’s work in building mechanical limbs. That’s because the printer can fabricate specific kinds of oddly shaped metal components that will help Weir and his team build new kinds of artificial wrists, fingers and hands.
“This aligns with what we’re doing. We can make small, custom gears and exotic gears with weird angles,” Weir said. “This is for anthropomorphic shapes, curves and surfaces that are really tough to lay out in a mechanical drawing … This is a new toy, and the first thing we have to do is play with it and explore its limits.”
Those limits could help redefine Weir’s work in prosthetics, and eventually offer applications to other teams at CU, Children’s Hospital Colorado and other entities on the Anschutz Medical Campus. For the moment, however, Weir and his research team will lead the charge to incorporate the new 3-D printer into their existing research and equipment.
Weir’s lab already has a 3-D printer that manufactures plastic pieces, but the metal printer that lab officials set up two weeks ago offers a new range of technology for researchers working in metal. Basically, the machine uses three-dimensional digital imaging to turn metal dust into solid metal objects. The machine can print objects in metals like titanium, nickel, chromium, magnesium and cobalt. There’s still a lot to learn when it comes to building and finalizing components, Weir said. The team will still have to do research regarding the finishing process for metal parts.
“We know what we’re doing. What we have to learn is support stuff that will come with experience,” Weir said. “But the projects are real. We’re playing with gears and gearing. I keep coming back to that,” he added, specifically citing the wide range of small, metal gears that go into prosthetics research.
The technology allows researchers to design and build complex metal parts in the space of a single day. The machine in the Children’s Hospital basement, a refurbished model built by the German company EOS e-Manufacturing Solutions, is the only one of its kind in the Denver metro area, and one of the few currently in use in the United States. This machine has been a long time coming for Weir and his team. The VA provided the grant in 2011, and Weir knocked about $250,000 off the final price because the machine had been previously used in Germany. But lab officials had to build a lab space in the Research Institute of the Children’s Hospital Colorado that could accommodate a complicated and delicate piece of equipment.
“It’s been sitting in a storage locker across the street for a year and a couple of months while we were waiting for the buildout of this space,” Weir said as he stood in the repurposed room. “There’s a lot of infrastructure, things like getting the right pressure and getting argon gas and natural gas running the right storage facility … There are a lot of safety considerations.”
Weir’s team will focus on components for prosthetic limbs, but he was quick to point out that the technology isn’t limited.
“If we can put them in plastic, we can put them in metal,” Weir said. “EOS in Belgium recently did a jaw reconstruction … They built it out of titanium.”
But for the moment, Weir is focused on the implications for his own specialized research. Weir, who came to CU after leading cutting-edge prosthetic research at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago for nearly a decade, specializes in designing and building mechanical hands. His work at the university falls in the realm of science fiction — the robotic hands he builds with students and fellow researchers feature microscopic sensors that are inserted directly into human muscle. It’s all designed to offer amputees artificial limbs with a new range of control and movement, and the massive machine in the Children’s Hospital basement will help Weir’s team fulfill that mission.
“We can get a lot more imaginative with our design,” said Matthew Davidson, a graduate research assistant in the lab and a student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. For more than a year, Davidson has been working on designing wrist components for artificial hand designs. “For me, I’m doing something that doesn’t have office shelf parts. It’s something we need to design ourselves.”
Davidson said the onsite metal printer could also speed up the testing process for the mechanical hands. Weir and his fellow researchers are currently working with the Alfred Mann Foundation, the Illinois Institute of Technology and Sigenics, Inc. to connect the new prosthetic technology with a living patient within the coming months.
“By printing, we can do a lot of things that would be impossible on a traditional machine. We have things with curved faces and an internal structure that you could not do on a traditional mill,” Davidson said. “We can say we need this part right now. It’s going to speed up our design process and get the parts out faster.”
But Weir said he’s also thinking of wider applications for the metal printer. The new machine will work along with the lab’s existing plastic printer, its 3-D imaging software and other resources devoted specifically to this new technology specifically mentioned by President Barack Obama during his latest State of Union address. The applications go far beyond the robotic hands that have been Weir’s focus for decades, and he’s hopeful the new machine will become part of a bigger resource for the Anschutz Medical Campus.
“Our goal is to turn this whole thing into a 3-D application facility and make it available to other researchers, other individuals who need it,” Weir said. “We have plastic prototyping systems, we have this metal prototyper, we have a 3-D scanner that can scan parts into a computer aided design program … It’s our hope to set this up as a core facility at the hospital and make it available.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
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