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Tan C, et al.

3.1.4 Foodini (Figure 6D) by Natural Machines, modification in this printer makes it a valuable in rapid
Spain [28] prototyping of new printers.
The Foodini houses five 100 mL stainless steel capsules 3.1.7 Sanna (Figure 6G) by Creative Machines Lab,
with independent temperature control up to 80°C in USA [31]
its storage bay. When the Foodini needs to change to a The Sanna printer is unique as it uses a selective
different food material mid-print, the printing arm will compliance assembly robot arm (SCARA) delivery
have to return the current capsule back into the bay and system, which can be seen in Figure 9A, for its X and
pick up the next capsule. The printer will then have to Y movements instead of the conventional cartesian-
prime the capsule and re-calibrate itself. This results in coordinate arm. This allows the Sanna to be both
a much more time-consuming multi-material printing compact and precise. It houses eight 60 mL capsules
than if offset nozzles were used. In addition to food can be independently heated via induction coils. Like
pastes, the nozzles provided by Natural Machines can the Foodini, it suffers from a time-consuming process
be as large as 4 mm in diameter and thus may be able to for material change. The Sanna also houses an infra-
accommodate larger food particle sizes such as crushed red module for cooking printed foods (Figure 9B). The
nuts or vegetable brunoise. designers envision that the Sanna can be refilled using
3.1.5 F3D (Figure 6E) by Imperial College, UK [29] frozen food-puree pellets which liquefy in the capsule
(Figure 9C).
The F3D, pronounced as “fed”, was a prototype built
in 2014 by four undergraduate students from Imperial 3.1.8 Model F5 commercial art pancakes printer
College, London. It contains three frame-mounted (Figure 6H) by ZBOT, China [32]
paste material extruders on the printer. It is one of the
two printers in this review that has a heat source that The ZBOT F5 is a delta-configuration printer that was
is used to cook the food that has been printed. The full designed to print thin-layer foods like pancakes from a
design and budget is available on an external website [29] batter. The print bed is a heated griddle to allow instant
maintained by Luis Rodriguez Alcalde. cooking of the pancake batter upon deposition. Unlike
the conventional syringe-based printing, the F5 has a 1.2L
3.1.6 Fab@Home Model 3 (Figure 6F) by Creative capacity storage tank. This allows the printer to operate
Machines Lab, USA [30] for a long time before refilling is required. However, this
means that only 1 material may be used each time when
The Fab@Home Model 3, is a fully open-source, it is refilled. For change of extrusion material, a thorough
multi-toolhead, multi-material 3D printer. Besides the cleaning has to be done.
syringe-based toolheads that can be used for pastes
in general (shown in Figure 8), this printer can also 3.1.9 QiaoKe chocolate printer (Figure 6I) by 3DCloud,
perform conventional computer numerical control (CNC) China [33]
functions when equipped with the proper attachments.
These include laser cutting and engraving, woodwork, The QiaoKe is a chocolate printer designed to accept
plastic extrusion and even microscopy. The ease of solid chocolate beads. In doing so, it allows mid-print

Figure 8. Toolheads for use with the Fab@Home Model 3. Picture from conference paper presented by original inventors [30] .
(A) Mechanically driven dual-syringe toolhead. (B) Pressure-driven 4-material 10 mL syringe toolhead. (c) Pipetting toolhead for
bioplotting.

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