Thanks for checking out this round of Tech Briefs, a weekly batch of items covering the digital and life sciences landscapes. It goes live every Wednesday in Cardinal News.
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Skyphos receives patent for a speedy process development
A Blacksburg company specializing in micro-3D printing received its second U.S. patent award, according to a news release.
Skyphos Technologies announced the patent for a 3D printing process that could significantly accelerate the manufacturing of tiny, high-precision devices. The technology, known as multi-wavelength polymerization, uses multiple light frequencies at once to form intricate micro-scale structures and deeper features within a single build.
“It is akin to additive lithography,” Skyphos founder and CEO Elliot McAllister said in an email. “We can create incredibly small and complex shapes in seconds vs. using a mold process that has been the standard for decades.”
This opens up incredible speed and flexibility for the medical device industry, from drug delivery to diagnostics.
According to the company, the approach increases printing speeds by 30 to 100 times while maintaining the high tolerances required for the parts. The development is already attracting attention from universities and industry groups interested in applications ranging from microfluidics to biomedical devices.
Skyphos said in the news release that its methods eliminate hard tooling and don’t inherently require a cleanroom. That reduces capital cost and shortens manufacturing time.
“It’s a tectonic shift,” McAllister said in the news release. “Digital manufacturing lets clients iterate, shift, or alter designs at any time, with no fixed points in the process where you have to stop and retool. The root problem in additive has always been speed and materials; with this improvement we can now move clients across the development spectrum faster than legacy molding and support them through high volumes.”
Skyphos gained international visibility last year as a finalist in the 3D Printing Industry Awards “Innovation of the Year” category for its micro-3D printing platform and “dynamic layering” technology.
“Dynamic layering” is like adding a gearbox to a 3D printer, providing different speeds for different road conditions, the company said.
“The system can change layer heights and exposure conditions on the fly, switching between thick, fast layers for bulk regions and ultra-thin penetrating modes where high-precision membranes or microfeatures are needed,” Skyphos said in the news release. “As a result, whole parts can be produced in just a few seconds in some geometries, dramatically increasing build speed while preserving fidelity where it matters most.”
McAllister is a Virginia Tech materials science graduate who was part of the second cohort of RAMP, the Roanoke-based technology and life sciences accelerator. Skyphos is based in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, in Blacksburg.
The company was with its RAMP cohort when it applied for what would become the first patent it received, McAllister said via email. It is in micro-3D printing and “based on using a projector like you would find in a classroom, and changing the optics so that it can project a pixel about the size of the smallest cell in your body,” he wrote. “This allows it to print things that can separate those cells or groups of cells.”
Virginia Tech-led team uses high tech to hunt for microplastics on fish scales
Detecting microplastics in seafood could be the new needle in a haystack. It’s slow. It takes labor and it requires using chemicals to dissolve a fish and examining its debris under a microscope.
All that makes it impractical for routine monitoring in the seafood industry.
A study that Virginia Tech scientists are leading could extract that needle. Researchers are using hyperspectral imaging and artificial intelligence and have detected microplastics on fish surfaces with 95% accuracy, according to a Virginia Tech news release.
The study, published in the Journal of Chemometrics, shows the capability to monitor microplastic particles in real time, lead researcher Yiming Feng said in the news release.
“Instead of sampling one fish and sending it through days of lab work, you could scan thousands of fish as they move down a production line and immediately detect potential contamination,” said Feng, associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and extension specialist at the Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center.
Hyperspectral imaging uses sensors to read materials’ chemical makeup. The research team used it to scan fish fillets’ surfaces. Plastic and fish tissue can appear almost identical using this type of imaging, so the team trained an AI model to detect what was fish and what was plastic among particles about as small as a salt grain.
Feng’s lab previously has also worked with PepsiCo, using hyperspectral imaging to monitor oil content on potato chip production lines. The same system, adapted, might detect metal fragments, foreign debris and other contaminants on a variety of foods, according to the release.
But it will require improved speed and efficiency, along with improved detection of even smaller particles. Feng said that detecting particles more than 1 centimeter below the surface is more of a challenge. That may require combining his team’s approach with other sensing technologies.
If he and the team can get it to the right affordability and processing line efficiency, it could be a boon for both large and small fish businesses.
“Many seafood processors, in Virginia and nationwide, are small businesses,” Feng said. “A single recall can be devastating. At the same time, they face labor shortages and rising costs. Smart sensing technologies like this could help strengthen food safety while reducing dependence on manual inspection.”
