By Liz Stevens, writer, UV+EB Technology

Topshelf Enterprises, operating as 3D Solar in Knoxville, Tennessee, has developed additive manufacturing technologies to produce intricate molds for casting glass, metal and ceramic parts. The company currently supplies glass components to defense and industrial sectors, and it plans to commercialize solar module production using its proprietary process. 3D Solar’s molds are at the micro and macro scale, and they are used in casting parts at room temperature and at subzero. UV+EB Technology talked with the company’s founder, Daniel Clark, to learn more about how 3D Solar’s modular solar panels are produced.

Solar Cell Manufacturing Process

3D Solar mimicked a honeycomb-dodecahedron design to engineer a new solar cell design that is said to capture three times more energy at half the cost of conventional, silicon-based cells.

“We 3D-print polymer solar cell substrates, replicate them into molds and then apply our High-Volume Hybrid Additive Manufacturing Process to cast-mold large-area, micro-3D solar glass substrate panels,” said Clark. The polymer substrates are produced with volumetric printing or two-photon lithography, ensuring that there are no layer lines before their conversion into molds.

The company uses recycled glass waste, refined into ~7-micron particles, and employs subzero casting-molding with a cold plate to stabilize photopolymers during curing to prevent heat distortion. The casting mold itself sits on the cold plate. “At subzero temperatures,” Clark explained, “freezing eliminates heat distortion during UV or IR exposure, delivering a semiconductor-grade finish without post-processing. At room temperature, chemical curing enables casting of non-transparent binder resins combined with metals that light can’t penetrate.”

Energy Capture Through Design

The solar cells capture more energy than conventional solar cells by virtue of the micro-sized pattern in the surface of the cells. “We combine Cadmium Telluride’s strong light absorption co-efficient with a 3D design that delivers a larger surface area and that refracts and traps light,” Clark said. “Unlike flat panels that reflect solar light back into the atmosphere, our cells bounce that light internally like the pinball in a pinball machine, extracting greater solar energy.”

3D Solar uses UV and IR photoinitiators in its processes, with 385 nm-405 nm for UV and 670 nm-750 nm for near IR and IR.

Applications Beyond Solar

Clark described the micro and macro applications for this mold-building technology. “Any complex geometry that can be injection-molded in plastics now can be cast with glass, metals or ceramics using our process,” he said. “This unlocks shapes and materials that previously were impossible to mold.”

Looking Ahead

The company sees its methodologies advancing production methods for solar, battery, micro-optics, chips on glass substrates and auto parts, with a variety of benefits. “In the solar sector, micro 3D substrates increase surface area, boost absorption and shift output to mornings and evenings, flattening the Duck Curve,” Clark said.

In battery production, the technology can enable the production of micro 3D electrodes for higher power and longer cycle life. According to Clark, 3D Solar’s process bypasses ASML-scale EUV lithography equipment for micro-optics, producing advanced optics at lower cost.

“The AI semiconductor manufacturer Cerebras puts chips on silicon. We propose putting the chips on glass, similar to what advanced packaging company Absolics Inc. does. And, in automobiles,” said Clark, “our technology can be tapped for creating lightweight, high-strength complex parts from advanced materials.”

Topshelf Enterprises was recognized as part of the RadTech RadLaunch Class of 2024. For more information, visit https://3dsolar.co/.

What is Volumetric Additive Manufacturing?

John E. Hergert and A. Camila Uzcategui, Manifest Technologies

Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (VAM), sometimes called volumetric 3D printing, represents a breakthrough in how objects are built with light. Unlike traditional 3D printing, which stacks layers one at a time, VAM forms entire 3D shapes simultaneously within a photosensitive material. The field of VAM was incepted with the first demonstrations of Computed Axial Lithography (CAL) in 2017 by Shusteff, Kelly, Taylor and collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and UC Berkeley. This early work was framed as a departure from conventional layer-by-layer 3D printing that utilized projected light patterns from multiple angles into a photosensitive resin to reconstruct a 3D object within the volume. This tomographic approach, now often referred to as Tomographic VAM (TVAM), broke the mold of 3D printing, allowing for free-form, rapid, support-free and inherently layerless parts.

Since its introduction, the field has expanded to include extensions upon the tomographic approach, such as helical and sparse-view irradiation processing VAM, as well as novel volumetric implementations, such as Xolography, holographic VAM and parallax VAM, that utilize non-cylindrical geometries. Among these approaches, some original definitions of VAM were broken, including the entire geometry materializing at once. At the 2025 Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing Alliance (PAMA) meeting in Boulder, researchers and industry leaders convened to align on how to define and advance this fast-growing field. Discussions focused on unifying terminology, addressing measurement and material challenges, and setting the stage for standardization across emerging VAM platforms.

Volumetric Additive Manufacturing now can be broadly defined as any additive manufacturing approach that creates free-form three-dimensional objects by patterning material throughout a spatial volume, rather than by successive layer deposition or curing. Key criteria include layerlessness, arbitrary geometry formation, freedom to create parts anywhere within the volume without supports or attachment to a substrate, and simultaneous multi-voxel patterning – in contrast to voxel-by-voxel approaches, such as two-photon polymerization (TPP). This definition includes all techniques that deliver optical, acoustic or thermal energy within a bulk medium to induce localized solidification or phase transformation according to a computed three-dimensional field. As VAM techniques mature, they promise to dramatically accelerate manufacturing speed, enable new geometries and open new frontiers in applications ranging from optics to medical devices.