Two students in Qatar have created a 3D printer that can mass-print vegetables. In a first, Mohammad Annan and Lujain Al Mansoori are using artificially grown vegetable cells and UV light to print a prototype of an edible carrot. The information systems students at Doha’s Carnegie Mellon University won the top prize in the FoodTech category in the Business Incubation and Acceleration Hackathon, hosted in August by Qatar Development Bank.
Annan and Al Mansoori built their own 3D printer from scratch. So far, 3D-printed edibles were made with purees of vegetables or fruits – conventionally grown – to print food for those with eating disabilities, for instance. But these methods cannot support mass production. The students built upon current masked stereolithography technology – which uses ultraviolet light to set the “inks” – for their 3D printer, which allows fast, bulk printing compared with pre-existing 3D printing methods.
Source: aljazeera.com