Automated manufacturing process for sustainable prototyping of NMR transceivers.

Additive manufacturing has enabled rapid prototyping of components with minimum investment in specific fabrication infrastructure. These tools allow a fast iteration from design to functional prototypes within days or even hours. Such prototyping technologies exist in many fields, from 3-dimensional mechanical components, or printed electric circuit boards (PCBs) for electrical connectivity, to mention two. In the case of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy one needs the combination of both fields, we need to fabricate three-dimensional electrically conductive tracks as coils that are wrapped around a sample container. Fabricating such structures is difficult (e.g. 6 axes micro-milling) or simply not possible with conventional methods. In this paper, we modified an additive manufacturing method that is based on the extrusion of conductive ink to fastprototype solenoidal coil designs for NMR. These NMR coils, need to be as close to the sample as possible and by their shape have specific inductive values. The performance of the designs was first investigated using EM-field simulations, and circuit simulations. The coil found to have optimal parameters for NMR was fabricated by extrusion printing and its performance was tested in a 1.05 T imaging magnet. The objective is to demonstrate reproducible rapid prototyping of complicated designs with high precision that as a side effect hardly produces material waste during production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]