dialysis

2 Articles

Clean Up Your Resin-Printing Rinse With Dialysis

September 5, 2023 by 64 Comments

There’s a lot to like about resin 3D printing. The detail, the smooth surface finish, the mechanical simplicity of the printer itself compared to an FDM printer. But there are downsides, too, not least of which is the toxic waste that resin printing generates. What’s one to do with all that resin-tainted alcohol left over from curing prints?

How about sending it through this homebrew filtering apparatus to make it ready for reuse? [Involute] likens this process to dialysis, and while we see the similarities, what’s going on here is a lot simpler than the process used to filter wastes from the blood in patients with failing kidneys — there are no semipermeable membranes used here. Not that the idea suffers from its simplicity, mind you; it just removes unpolymerized resin from the isopropyl alcohol rinse using the same photopolymerization process used during printing. Continue reading “Clean Up Your Resin-Printing Rinse With Dialysis” →

Willem Kolff’s Artificial Organs

October 9, 2019 by 45 Comments

In my youth I worked for a paid ambulance service, and while we all lived for the emergency calls, the routine transports were the calls that paid the bills. Compared with the glamor and excitement of a lights-and-siren run to a car wreck or heart attack, transports were dull as dirt. And dullest of all were the daily runs from nursing homes to the dialysis center, where rows of comfy chairs sat, each before a refrigerator-sized machine designed to filter the blood of a patient in renal failure, giving them another few days of life.

Sadly, most of those patients were doomed; many were in need of a kidney transplant for which there was no suitable donor, while some were simply not candidates for transplantation. Dialysis was literally all that stood between them and a slow, painful death, and I could see that at least some of them were cheered by the sight of the waiting dialysis machine. The principles of how the kidneys work have been known since at least the 1800s, but it would take until 1945 for the efforts of a Dutch doctor, using used car parts and sausage casings, to make the predecessor of those machines: the first artificial kidney.

Continue reading “Willem Kolff’s Artificial Organs” →