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Watch On The metal is eutectic gallium-indium, which Grennan described as “about three parts gallium, one part indium” that, once mixed, is “liquid at room temperature.” The lab’s website says the droplets give the composite “soft elasticity” and “extreme toughness,” along with “autonomously self-healing electrical circuits.”
The metal is mixed into the uncured PDMS, which breaks it into separate droplets, each wrapped in a thin gallium oxide skin. About an hour in an oven turns the silicone from a gel into a solid, but the droplets inside stay liquid. The droplets are “on the order of 10 to 100 microns in diameter,” Grennan said in the video. The video was filmed at VT MADE, the university’s “New Center for Advanced Manufacturing,” a group of labs that includes the Soft Materials and Structures Lab where Grennan works.
The printer is a syringe-fed machine built so the lab can load the composite and print straight from the syringe, Grennan said. Droplet shape is determined by a setting that controls the ratio of how fast the composite leaves the nozzle compared to how fast the print bed moves. The proper selection stretches the round droplets into long, thin ones. Stretching the droplets allows heat to travel along the long axis of each, “away from a heat source to a heat sink,” Grennan said. Asked about uses, he pointed to custom heat sinks and stretchable wearable devices.
A 2025 paper in Advanced Functional Materials, co-authored by Michael Bartlett, the associate professor of mechanical engineering who runs the lab, put the printed composite’s thermal conductivity along the droplets’ direction at 9.9 W/mK, about 40 times that of the unfilled silicone. A separate 2024 paper in Additive Manufacturing says that the oxide skin “is found to play a unique and critical role in the reconfiguration and retention of droplet shape.”
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/virginia-tech-lab-3d-prints-a-liquid-metal-composite-to-guide-heat-boost-thermal-conductivity-40x-the-nozzle-stretches-gallium-indium-droplets-inside-soft-silicone-can-also-create-self-healing-traces#main
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