A multi-material 3D printing made of liquid photo-curable resin without intermixing has been successfully achieved by microstereolithography. Microstereolithography enables high-resolution and precise 3D structuring from various types of liquid photo-curable resins. However, in order to realize it for practical use, it has been a big challenge to overcome many of the issues in the procedure of exchanging resins without intermixing them.

An innovative microstereolithography system, developed by the authors of this recent Optical Materials Express article, allows multi-material (color) 3D printing. An interesting approach of providing arbitrary multi-material 3D printing in this article is the exchange procedure of the materials. The system is composed of a simple setup: a glass palette that stores multiple droplets of resins and a solvent tank for the development process. By using this fabrication system, multi-material 3D microstructures can be made without contaminating the resins. Additionally, this technique does not need a material storage bath, and the amount of resin waste was minimized.

This unique microstereolithography can be expected to work as an advanced style of multi-material 3D printing together with other 3D printing techniques.

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