Researchers develop 3-D Food Printer for food
You will soon be able to impress upon your girlfriend in a novel way. Here comes a 3D food printer that can fabricate edible items through computer-guided software and the actual cooking of edible pastes, gels, powders and liquid ingredients — all in a prototype that looks like an elegant coffee machine.
Professor Hod Lipson of Columbia University is developing a coffeemaker-sized 3D food printer that has practical applications in the home kitchen, for nutrition and health benefits, and for special needs populations.
At the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, Professor Hod Lipson is hot on the heels of one of the biggest trends in home and office technology—3D printing—and he wants to make it accessible from the comfort of your own home. The multi-disciplinary lab, which comprises talent from departments including engineering, computer science, physics, math, and biology, is dedicated to taking ideas from abstract models to working systems—and their latest endeavor feels like it’s straight from the future. Say hello to professor Lipson’s coffeemaker-sized 3D food printer, destined (fingers crossed) for a kitchen countertop near you.
“Food printers are not meant to replace conventional cooking as they won’t solve all
of our nutritional needs nor cook everything we should eat,” said Lipson.But they will produce an infinite variety of customized fresh, nutritional foods on demand, transforming digital recipes and basic ingredients supplied in frozen cartridges into healthy dishes that can supplement our daily intake.
“I think this is the missing link that will bring the benefits of personalized data-driven health to our kitchen tables – it’s the ‘killer app’ of 3D printing,” Lipson added.
The printer is the result of a design project Lipson done with Drim Stokhuijzen from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Jerson Mezquita from State University of New York System’s (SUNY) Maritime College.
The major challenge is getting the printer to “cook” the food.
The printer is fitted out with a robotic arm that holds eight slots for frozen food cartridges. The students are now working on incorporating an infrared heating element into the arm.
Unlike conventional oven cooking, the 3D printer will be able to cook various ingredients at different temperatures and different durations, all controlled by a new software.
Lipson and his team aim to have their prototype printing much faster and more accurately by the end of the year, and, they hope, cooking as it prints too.
“If we can leverage this technology to allow artificial intelligence tools to design and create new things for us, we can achieve immeasurable potential,” Lipson noted in a university statement.
3D food printing offers revolutionary new options for convenience and customization, from controlling nutrition to managing dietary needs to saving energy and transport costs to creating new and novel food items, the authors said.
