Purdue University’s marching band made headlines in 2021 with its enormous drum, which couldn’t fit into the visitor’s tunnel at Notre Dame Stadium, missing its first football game since 1979.
However, the latest Boilermaker drum making waves is quite the opposite in size.
Last week, Purdue engineers achieved a Guinness World Record for the “World’s Smallest Drum”—a nearly microscopic 3D-printed drum that is about half the diameter of a human hair.
This minuscule drum, though too small to be played, was created to test Purdue’s new Photonic Professional GT2 3D printer. This advanced printer produces microplastic materials used mainly for medical purposes.
Dave Cappelleri, a professor of mechanical engineering and assistant vice president for research innovation at Purdue, spearheaded the record-breaking effort. He noted that the printer was developed with support from a grant from the National Science Foundation.
“Sometimes a giant leap can be very small. It can be as tiny as 47 microns,” Cappelleri remarked.
Cappelleri and his team anticipate that the new 3D printer will significantly enhance their ability to create microrobots—tiny, remote-controlled devices often measuring a millimeter or less in diameter. These microrobots require specialized equipment for production.
“Instead of using filament, we employ a photosensitive resin and a laser. The laser finely polymerizes small regions of the design to create extremely small parts,” Cappelleri explained.
The implications of this small drum are broad, ranging from more efficient creation of microrobots to enabling these bots to perform a wider range of movements, such as swimming or flipping.
In medical applications, microrobots can assist in performing precise surgeries, stimulating cells, delivering drugs, and more.
Cappelleri highlighted that with the new printer, manufacturing microbots now takes just a few hours, compared to the previous week-long process.
An unexpected part of their research journey was the process of obtaining the world record.
“It was quite a task documenting everything, submitting the paperwork, and having experts verify everything,” Cappelleri said. “We were thrilled when we received the news and are excited to share it with the world.”
Purdue noted that their “World’s Smallest Drum” is approximately 184 trillion times smaller than the All-American Marching Band’s famous “World’s Largest Drum.”
