3D printing near net shape parts with no post-processing

Carnegie Mellon University Professor Rahul Panat, and his team, were developing a new type of 3D printed Brain-Computer Interface (or BCI) device where custom micropillars capture the communication signals from neurons when they stumbled upon an unexpected problem: the micropillars in the array bent during sintering. These BCI devices, now called "CMU Arrays," stack millions of metal nanoparticles in 3D space and then sinter, i.e., fuse them together.