Episode #85 | Jetting the Impossible: Ben Hartkopp on Printing Ultra-Viscous Materials

Printhead technology may not sound revolutionary, but what if it could radically transform the way we manufacture everything from electric motors to medical implants? That's exactly what Ben Harkoff and his team at Quantica have achieved with their breakthrough inkjet system that can handle materials 10-20 times more viscous than any conventional technology.

Starting in 2018 with a simple goal of printing electronics, Ben's team became frustrated when every existing printhead failed spectacularly when trying to eject viscous resins. Their solution? Design something completely new using piezo crystal actuators and compliant mechanisms that could amplify deformation. This innovation unlocked the ability to print materials with viscosities ranging from 250 millipascal-seconds at operating temperatures to 15,000 millipascal-seconds at room temperature, opening up vast new possibilities for manufacturing.

What's particularly fascinating is Quantica's journey from 3D printing visionaries to practical problem-solvers. As Ben candidly shares, the company discovered its most immediate impact wasn't in creating complete 3D-printed products but in revolutionizing existing manufacturing processes. Their technology now enables precision deposition of adhesives for e-motors, replacing inefficient dispensing methods and potentially improving motor efficiency. They've validated the printing of true platinum-catalyzed silicone (SYLGARD 184) without additives—a breakthrough for medical applications—and are exploring how viscoelastic materials enhance cell viability for bioprinting applications.

Whether you're interested in manufacturing technology, materials science, or how startups navigate the challenging path from invention to commercial success, this conversation offers valuable insights. Ben's advice for aspiring inventors? "Become obsessed and become an expert in research... train your attention span... and learn about politics, because part of the job is not only the technical depth but also dealing with people." Listen now to discover how printing the unprintable is creating entirely new possibilities across industries.

Complete show notes with references

Transcript

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Introduction to Ben Hartkoff and Quantica

Speaker 1 0:01

Hi everyone , welcome back to the Lattice podcast , the official podcast from 3D Heels . I'm your host , jenny Chen . In today's episode we travel to Berlin where I sat down with Ben Harkoff , co-founder of Quantica and one of the minds behind a revolutionary printhead technology . Ben's team developed a system that can jet ultra-viscous materials , something no other printhead could manage . It unlocked entirely new applications in dental electronics , e-motors and even bioprinting . We talked about the early days of trial and error , the moment they realized their breakthrough , and how Quantica has pivoted from focusing solely on 3D printing to solving real industrial problems like replacing slow manual processes in screen printing and adhesive deposition . Ben also shared his thoughts on the future of medical-grade silicone printing , functionalized scaffolds for bioprinting and what it takes to turn technical depth into commercial impact . And yes , ben has some fantastic advice for students and future inventors . Just a quick reminder this podcast is for informational purposes only . Nothing shared here is medical , legal or financial advice . Opinions are our own or our guests . Let's dive in .

Speaker 2 1:29

Hi Ben , good to see you in person , Hi Jenny . Yeah , finally nice to meet you .

Speaker 1 1:32

Yeah , last time I saw you was in 2022 , through our virtual event . Exactly yeah , you were part of the biomaterial panel and I learned a lot from you , but

Developing revolutionary printhead technology

Speaker 1 1:42

also it was a lot of information . But I am so glad that on my journey a venture this time to Germany I was able to visit your lab , your research areas and really get to know Quantica a lot more , and also quite excited about the journey of the company .

Speaker 2 2:03

Yeah , yeah , me as well . Very unexpected .

Speaker 1 2:07

I think most of the people probably are still not very familiar about Quantica outside of Germany , so I would love to hear your just a brief description of the story behind founding of the company .

Speaker 2 2:25

Yeah , sure , so it was founded in berlin in 2018 . So , yeah , by mid of 2018 , a colleague of mine and myself and , well , another sort of friend had developed sort of the core concept for what we wanted to do in terms of a printhead , because prior we were experimenting around with printheads , trying to make them work for 3D materials , like off-the-shelf resins essentially and they all broke down . Nothing worked . We tried to heat the material that was our path forward but all the print heads just died within minutes usually , so we fixated on just doing our own . We started with some piezo crystal actuated sort of large-scale systems you can buy off the shelf and had some success with that . So we were able to eject off-the-shelf resins and then miniaturize these type of piezo-driven actuators . So the piezo crystals they basically , when you pass electricity through them , they deform , and we found that when you have a compliant mechanism that you add to them , you can amplify the deformation quite well . And so we landed in a design where we had basically like a metal strip and a piezo on top and it could oscillate quite quickly and quite a lot and that was able to push , basically , material out , and from that we continuously developed a printed design that was more and more capable and more and more able to eject very high viscous

From 3D printing to solving industrial problems

Speaker 2 3:56

materials .

Speaker 2 3:56

At the time we didn't even know that that was such a big deal , we just wanted to have more nozzles .

Speaker 2 4:02

We started with eight and then went to 24 . And then we slowly realized , okay , this is a big deal actually , because none of the print heads that exist can eject very high viscous materials , and with that I mean there's a large scale difference . So 10 to 20 millipascal is sort of the unit it's usually what's considered even higher values , and but we could do materials that were hundreds , so like 150 to 200 , 250 empaths , so that was quite a big deal . And this even translates to materials when they're at room temperature being much higher , like 15 000 amperes , and so this opened up a huge amount of chemistry for us . So adhesives , even inks with large particle loading , like conductive inks , resins that can be used in dental applications with like glass filler in them , so they have much higher break resistance , and so slowly we realized that this is very fundamental and that we could replace a lot of different applications , but still the focus was mostly on 3D printing at the time and then suddenly we realized , okay , we're getting a lot more customers from 2D printing .

Speaker 1 5:17

Well , let's rewind a little bit before we go into the juicy part of the development Back then . What motivated you to looking ? Look into the space . You said you were trying to solve a problem with resin . What were you trying to print ?

Speaker 2 5:33

uh , basically , uh , we're trying to do an electronics printer that could do like pcb substrate and also conductive inks in the beginning , so , but then we really mostly focused on resin because we had early investors from the resin printing space . I see yeah .

Speaker 1 5:52

But you didn't grow up wanting to be a printhead inventor .

Speaker 2 5:56

No , no , no . I was always fascinated with technology in general . Physics and chemistry were my main focus , and I've been researching all my life , essentially , but before that I actually studied film , so yeah , guys , if you notice , our background is completely professionalized filmmaking .

Speaker 1 6:17

And so how did you ? What is the dot , the thing that's connecting these dots of your change of interest or development of interest ?

Speaker 2 6:27

So yeah , basically I always wanted to do the things that I found to be very hard and challenging , and I think making a large movie and filmmaking and knowing about all of the technological aspects , such as basic camera technology and lighting and how to go along with people , was always sort of a nice challenging outlook . Before that I had studied physics , but then I wanted to do something more meaningful with more impact , and then basically this was combining two things right being able to develop with good friends in a high dynamic environment and then also possibly having something that can generate like a real fundamental impact on on manufacturing , essentially yeah , I do see some parallel of these two storylines yeah is .

Speaker 1 7:16

You are a highly technical person I think anyone who's meeting for five minutes , who can tell ? Yeah you are filled with physics and science and terminologies , but you are very driven by the applications behind the technology .

Speaker 2 7:32

That what you can do so right now .

Speaker 1 7:34

You

Pivoting toward real-world applications

Speaker 1 7:35

know , in the history of quantica , I see a parallel storyline , which is you . You had a technological breakthrough essentially in 2018 . And ever since , like many other technological startups , people are trying to find the killer app that the technology can use . Yeah , so what was that journey like ? You started with 3D printing for electronics , and then , at some point , quantico was focusing on life science applications , and now you're certainly at a different location , focusing mostly on industrial . Yes , yeah .

Speaker 2 8:10

Yeah . So it basically started , of course , with like an idealized and sort of naive approach , let's say , which is very useful and very needed in sort of the early phases of technical development useful and very needed in sort of the early phases of technical development and of course we wanted to always have some real products that we could print with 3d applications . That was sort of the most disappointing part to us back then , that nothing of the things you printed were really like a useful end product . Right , it's quite hard to do that in this manufacturing space . You need like much higher resolution and much more material capability and multi-material capability . And we figured , okay , all these things are there , but of course there's many things that you have to be first that you're tackling when you're taking that approach . So nobody before , even in the multi-material jetting space , had to look at actual material characteristics , like the physical sort of brake resistance , for example . It was always in a very low sort of field , but we now had the capability to go much higher . But then you have a lot of processes that interfere with that and make it sort of tough to deal with . And so we realized at some point okay , there's many more people coming to us from . I mean , we had a dental player that was coming to us and we're still developing for that . But many more people were coming from the 2D field , where just materials were not resilient enough .

Speaker 2 9:41

There's a lot more boundaries that exist in analog fields like screen printing or dispensing or slot die coating are huge application fears , each one of them much larger than 3d printing in itself , and all of them have major restrictions .

Speaker 2 9:58

So the materials are not as resilient and not chemically compatible , or they want to use you know , you want to use coatings with elastomers or silicones , for example , and all of these chemistries are not really available or not scalable or not digitizable , and so basically now we're focusing much more on replacing screen printing , digitizing processes that are currently sort of super manual , very slow , like dispensing , where you have one nozzle to fill , like large surfaces , which takes minutes , which you can do in potentially a single pass when you're using Inkjet , right . So we're working now with a lot of customers to do undirected application development Some of the largest players in electronics , sort of lifestyle products , then also largest in the aerospace field and , yeah , as well as , yeah , electronics and also automotive . Automotive is especially interesting because we've just printed our first sort of lab-grade silicone . We've validated that it works and now we're moving to sort of high-degree medical-grade silicones and we want to also see that work for 2D applications but then eventually also for 3D applications .

Speaker 1 11:24

Absolutely , and I think the transition , though , from you know , originally very focused on the 3d material and 3d printing , because it was so exciting , I would say a decade or so ago at least um . How did you make that transition as an overnight transition ?

Speaker 2 11:39

no , it was long-term transition , like it's . Yeah , it took a while , took a lot of convincing . We grew to , you know , 50 people almost , uh , that work here and yeah , it took a while . Basically , the customers that we interacted with was the deciding factor over time . So we got more and more customers in the field of adhesive deposition , for example . So we've done e-motor stacks where we coat them with adhesive much better than you could with dispensing units , for example , and that was like okay , this is much easier for us than a full 3D printed product . This is directly available and we can scale into that . And that is the thing the application focus that we realized at some point that was missing in the 3D field , the total application focus .

Speaker 1 12:33

Yeah , I mean , I would imagine when you founded the company , everybody was very excited about 3D printing . Yes , the vision is that we're going to use 3D to change the world . When you change that vision a little bit , does that impact your team cohesiveness or people leaving , or something like that ?

Speaker 2 12:51

Not too much , I would say , because if you just look at it rationally , we still have all that opportunity open . It's just that this is a long-scale process , requires more funding and more time , and so that's the thing when you're a startup .

Speaker 1 13:09

You have to survive . Agility yeah , exactly . And so that's the thing when you're a startup you have to survive .

Speaker 2 13:12

You have to be agile .

Speaker 1 13:12

Agility yeah exactly .

Speaker 2 13:13

You have to be agile and you have to survive , and everyone knows this . There's no secrets within this organization , so everyone is aware where we need to go and what we need to do in order to just have the biggest impact . And still , the technology impacts then a lot of very large areas and it's yeah makes a decisive difference . So it's always good to keep people around you that are mentally flexible enough to deal with all these things but it's not easy yeah , it's certainly quite a hard thing to to do , yeah and how were your investors react to the change , or pivot ?

Speaker 2 13:50

quite well , actually , because we already had it because we already had so many customers in that space and that's a good thing . Of course , that's a really important sign to go towards that and move ahead with those things . And also , we're extremely upfront with our customers , exactly telling them our capabilities , and we only go as far as we need to . We never overextend anything . We stop if we see , okay , it doesn't work . But we have enough opportunities with very large players that we can still pursue because they're technologically viable . And really that's the thing that actually works . Right Is to be completely precise , upfront , have very deep technical analysis of their materials , pre-characterizations and then test their jetability and then , of course , the next step is to continue the development process and to scale it up together . That's where we are currently with a couple of our customers with like a couple of our customers .

Speaker 1 14:51

So , ben , would you mind sharing with us a success story of this kind of customer collaboration and then to a successful product ?

Speaker 2 14:58

So we're not yet at the fully developed product stage with everyone .

E-motor manufacturing success story

Speaker 2 15:02

We have basically validated . For example , one thing that we did quite in a quite short term was one of the biggest e-motor manufacturers in europe or also in the world , came to us with the task of depositing adhesives between the layers of the e-motor rotors and stators , and this deposition is currently done with dispensing , so like a shower head that just pulls on big droplets and then they get pressed together , the material gets pushed out a little bit , and so it's not ideal the way that these things are adhered . The adhesive has to be isolating , and so it's quite tough for them to implement these things on a larger scale and they lose some efficiency during the production process . So with us , we basically they tasked us hey , can you print this on top of these metal sheets ? And we did it . We did it quite quickly , immediately and right away . There's a material that is 13,000 ampers at room temperature , and so no other printer technology can do that .

Speaker 1 16:12

Of course , it's a better thing to glue things together .

Speaker 2 16:15

in other words , yes exactly , yeah , and because you can also change where you have adhesive and you don't , and where you have conductance across the layers and where you have isolation across the layers , etc . This is quite an important element for the efficiency of the motor . So actually you can increase efficiency and have better design variability and now you have a system that actually scales better as well in terms of speed . So we're still pursuing that and we're still in the application development process and currently we only sell the sort of application development process and currently we only sell sort of these tools for application development . But we are moving towards selling large-scale print engines , as we call them for inline , sort of printhead arrays that can do inline manufacturing or just large-scale , large-surface manufacturing .

Speaker 1 17:08

Since , I mean my audience mostly are interested in healthcare applications , would you like to elaborate a little bit of what you guys potentially can get into from a healthcare

Bioprinting and medical silicones future

Speaker 1 17:18

perspective ?

Speaker 2 17:18

Sure , yeah , we have multiple things that we're pursuing . One is basically research towards cellular deposition . So , basically , this research team based in Berlin found out that viscoelastic materials have a big impact on cell viability during the printing process , because the energy gets dissipated in the material and not directly transferred onto the cell walls , for example , and so we are sort of testing different type of media in which cells can be transported , and this media can actually be functionalized as well to create structures , and with the multi-material capability we're aiming then to do multicellular structured prints .

Speaker 1 18:03

So these will be acellular scaffolds rather than with the cell in it . Yeah , or scaffolds rather than with the cell in it ?

Speaker 2 18:08

Yeah , no , you can . So there's multiple approaches . We can either load the cell on a per layer basis after sort of the scaffolding deposition , or you can have the cells loaded within some of these functional scaffolding materials because of how they polymerize and don't have they still allow cell viability after the deposition . So that's the type of thing that excites me quite a bit . I think everybody is very excited about that kind of thing in our industry .

Speaker 1 18:35

But it certainly is more exciting to see there is an inkjet process that we can actually use for bioprinting application . Because , this field . While very exciting , with a huge vision in front of us , the technical advancement has been slow and painful and needs a lot of funding , so it's great to hear that you guys are working on it .

Speaker 2 18:56

Yes .

Speaker 1 18:56

So if you're going to be this future fortune teller or maybe not fortune teller , because you probably know what do you hope the company can achieve in the next three to five years ?

Speaker 2 19:09

I think for us it will be important to break into different sectors and essentially we want to replace analog processes . I think screen printing is a big one . It's currently widely used wherever you need uneven surfaces covered with inks that need to be resilient against touch . We're currently validating these types of materials and then further , I think , focus on adhesive deposition and digitizing sort of coatings , adhesives , and then also breaking into silicone . We've just validated our first printable true silicone , basically a platinum-catalyzed or catalytically polymerized silicone , which means that this type of silicone can be used for medical-grade applications , because we have no evidence of any other additives , it's just a pure lab-grade silicone . It's actually SILIGARD 184 , so one of the most popular lab scale silicones available , and we are now aiming for a higher grade sort of high elasticity , high tensile strength silicone . And yeah , that's that that will be usable in a huge amount of applications , also in the medical sector , of course , because these type of elastic interfaces are critical in many applications .

Speaker 1 20:37

What's your origin ? Was it trying to print electronics ? Would the screen print technology that you were envisioning can also be used

Advice for students entering the industry

Speaker 1 20:45

for printing electronics like wearables and stuff like that ?

Speaker 2 20:49

Yes , yeah , so that's the cool thing you can combine different substrates or model materials with electrically conductive materials as well . We've tested that as well . We've ejected some of the highest grade uh conductive inks on the market , uh , so with very high particle loading and even larger particle sizes , and this allows basically , yeah , also for all kinds of crazy things . But the thing is , with this , I think the horizon is always a bit further ahead , because , yeah , just to get the right conductivity on substrate , to get it right every time , this is quite a challenge and requires different types of curing modes as well . So , yeah , but we're looking into it as well .

Speaker 1 21:34

One final question for you , Ben , is what kind of advice do you have for a college student right now who are looking into the industry ?

Speaker 2 21:45

Yeah , basically become obsessed and become an expert in research . So just reading papers every day is really worth it . I think you need to train your attention span . You need to just be very mindful and also learn about politics , because part of the job is not only sort of the technical depth but also dealing with people , interacting with them . I wasn't too good at that for a while , I would say , but now I'm very thankful that I could build such a great team around me . We have an amazing team in Barcelona , we have an amazing team here in Berlin , and if you look for the right people as well that are just driven and have high goals on their own and that are open and mindful to to sort of achieving things together , then that's really the way to go and that stabilizes everything . That's really critical that's great advice yeah well , thank you , ben .

Speaker 1 22:45

I look forward to more crazy things you're going to be able to print with your technologies thanks and hope to catch up some other time thank you so much .

Speaker 2 22:52

Thank you all , right , thank .