The whole “exploding tiny drops of metal” in the middle of this is just Loony Toons. This machine is literally insane and two of the companies I am long-long on would be completely fucked without it.
IIRC from the Veritasium video[0] there is actually some hydrogen gas flowing at quite a high speed though the laser chamber to carry away the tin debris so that it does not accumulate on the mirrors.
Seeing this news story made me briefly fear that they’d found a way to replace this glorious mechanism. Thankfully not. In fact, they’re going to shoot more droplets, more often!
Yes it was crazy when I first heard about it "wait what? they shoot it in mid-air?" and that was before I found out they did that like 30k times a second.
But now 100k times a second apparently. Humans are amazing.
You have a machine that’s basically a clean room inside and one of the parts is essentially electrosputtering tin but then throwing all the tin away and using the EM pulse from the sputter to do work.
Oh and can you build it so it can run hundreds or thousands of hours before being cleaned? Thanks byyyyyyyyeeeeee!