Purdue sets Guinness World Record for smallest drum to aide in nanobot research
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The giant drum used by Purdue University’s marching band made news in 2021, when it couldn’t fit into the visitor’s tunnel at Notre Dame Stadium, causing it to miss its first football game since 1979.
That won’t be a problem for the latest Boilermaker drum making headlines.
Last week, Purdue engineers won a Guinness World Record for the “World’s Smallest Drum” — a nearly microscopic 3D-printed drum that’s about half the diameter of a human hair.
The drum is too small to be played, but rather it was made to test Purdue’s new Photonic Professional GT2 3D printer, which makes microplastic materials that are primarily used for medical purposes.
Dave Cappelleri, professor of mechanical engineering and assistant vice president for research innovation, is behind the new world record and said the printer was made possible with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
“Sometimes a giant leap can be very small. It can be as small as 47 microns,” Cappelleri said.
Cappelleri and his team expect the new 3D printer will accelerate their ability to make microrobots—an untethered device that can be remote controlled. These microbots are often a millimeter or smaller in diameter and so they need to be made by specialized equipment.
“Instead of having a filament reaction, we have a photosensitive resin and a laser. And the laser can very finely polymerize small regions of the [design] to make very small parts,” Cappelleri explained.
The applications the small bass drum represents are numerous, from being able to create microbots more efficiently to allowing the bots a wider range of motion like swimming or flipping.
Inside the human body, microbots can help perform more precise surgeries, stimulate cells, deliver drugs and more.
Cappelleri noted that with the printer, the manufacturing of the microbots can now take a few hours, rather than about a week.
One thing Cappelleri and his team didn’t expect would come with their research? A world record vetting process.
“It was quite a process of documenting everything and submitting all the paperwork and we got experts to verify everything,” Cappelleri said. “When we got the news, we were really excited and we’re happy to share it with the world.”
Purdue said the “World’s Smallest Drum” is about 184 trillion times smaller than the All-American Marching Band’s iconic “World’s Largest Drum.”