14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, chewing gum helps with memory retention, even though it is not the best idea for the stomach. Whether or not this will be sufficient incentive for people to start 3D printing chewing gum at home, though, is anyone's guess.
That is what we are going to talk about today: 3D printed chewing gum. Apparently, food isn't the only thing that you'll be able to create at the press of a single button in the future.
In a way, this is not so surprising. Chewing gum is food you don't actually swallow after all. Not that different.
One might even argue it is easier to print since it takes fewer distinct ingredients to pull off. Enough to wonder why people didn't think of it from the onset.
The particulars of the 3D printed chewing gum
Chia-Ling Lin, student at London’s Royal College of Art, has teamed up with Maria Nelson, a Material Sciences PhD student from the Imperial College.
Their goal was to create a way to 3D print chewing gum that would behave just like the conventional article, and looked like it too.
The latter was easy to do, since chewing gum comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The hard part was finding a mix of substances that could be properly deposited by a 3D printer without losing their chewy qualities.
Eventually, the two settled on a fairly typical gum resin and flavoring, with a single thin metal extruder pushing it out like a normal FDM printer.
The piece of gum is built layer by layer by a Cartesian 3D printer whose head can move along all three axes (X, Y and Z).
The unique thing about the gum is that you can feel and taste each printed layer during the initial chewing stages. It's not just one big lump of “elastic.”
The bottom line
The two students were able to create a way to 3D print chewing gum at home. Gum just as good as normal store-brought one but with better texture. The GumJet 3D printer, as it seems to be called by the new parent company Gumlab.uk, sounds like it might be too specialized to ever make it as a product, especially with how young the consumer 3D printing industry is, but stranger things have happened.
