If you’ve been keeping up with technological trends within the past decade, you may have noticed just how fast-paced these trends evolve.
With the development of nanotechnology, advances in miniaturized technology have come to the forefront of many industries. With smaller parts comes the need to put these together through the use of glues, adhesives, and other elements which must be precisely measured in order for a product to function properly.
Microdispensing is the process of dispensing minute quantities of liquid or other media, often in volumes not exceeding one microliter.
Here, we’ll explore what microdispensing is and how it’s applied in a few different industries.
Why is Microdispensing Important?
Microdispensing for industries is part of a process that creates products in fields such as electronics manufacturing, medicine, biomechanics, and several other manufacturing processes which must build smaller apparatuses.
For advances in electronic applications and in medicine, the use of microdispensing technology is critical. In all of these industries, the components used to fabricate tools and technology are growing increasingly smaller. In order to put these tools together, microdispensing has become part of an essential fabrication process.
Without microdispensing, tools needed in complex electronics such as your smartphone and many of the other devices we rely on would be nearly impossible to build. In any case, it would take much longer to build them without microdispensing technology, and they would be far costlier than they currently are today.
Products
The use of microdispensing technology is not limited to the medical field, hardware and software development, or the electronics manufacturing space. These tools are also used in several of our most popular products. Some products that we see microdispensing technology used with are as follows:
Coca-Cola
If you’ve ever been to a casino, or to a modern hotel, arcade, or large venues with vending machines, you’ve probably come across a “Freestyle” machine.
The Coca-cola freestyle machine (instead of using the large cardboard bibs that traditional fountain drink machines typically access), implements the use of a microdispensing machine.
The products in a Freestyle machine are made using concentrated ingredients and are processed through the machine using a micro dispenser whenever a customer chooses a particular flavor.
Unlike a soda bib, a Freestyle box of product may contain up to 4 different flavors. Additional product boxes are also used to add flavor, sugar, and additives to the beverage before it is dispensed for consumption. All of these product boxes are activated when you choose your flavor, and an internal micro dispenser brings it all to you for your enjoyment.
3D Printing
A 3D printer is used to form complex shapes, from anything to a wearable mask to the parts of a firearm. Though 3D printing technology is still in its infancy stage, the use of microdispensing technology makes it possible for a 3D printer to print virtually anything.
3D printers use acrylic technology and plastics that harden into the shapes that the processor is programmed to make. The micro dispenser acts like an inkjet printer, only capable of producing three-dimensional shapes.
Without the use of a micro dispenser, a 3D printer would not be possible.
Modern Inkjet Printers
Like 3D printers, modern inkjet printers are evolving and becoming much more efficient at producing high-resolution images. This is only made possible through the use of microdispensing technology.
If you consider the quality of inkjet resolution only a decade ago, you’ll easily be able to tell the difference in the quality and appearance of the images. Older models are less capable of creating detailed images in the way that they’re produced today.
The ability of an inkjet printer’s microdispensing nozzle to create much smaller details has made our inkjet technology of today far superior to even the most advanced inkjet printers from ten years ago.
As humans continue to evolve and our technology evolves with us, be prepared for many of our devices to be made much smaller, containing smaller parts.
This makes the need for microdispensing technology critical for the production of products that we need in order to function comfortably in today’s modern society.
