Lifeboat Foundation

A failing pipe can be tough to spot. It may cause a puddle, produce another sign of damage, or simply burst before detection. A flooded kitchen or laundry room is messy and inconvenient, but the stakes are much, much higher in nuclear power plants—which on average contain many miles of pipeline.

As concern about aging plants escalates, Vanderbilt engineers are working on an early warning system. They are using polymer coatings on the inside of the pipe and 3D-printed polymer devices infused with nanoparticles as sensors to signal the changes on the outside of the pipe. And, they hope, sound.

A huge challenge is to detect the changes in the polymer film occurring inside the pipe. To create a useful and proactive technique, the team wants to use sound, or vibrometry, to identify these internal changes from outside the pipe.

Bio printing footage provided by College of Engineering, and heart valve footage provided by Regenerative Biomaterials Group, Carnegie Mellon University.
https://regenerativebiomaterials.com/

Lulzbot invited us out to showcase the BIO, their OPEN SOURCE 3D printer capable of 3D bioprinting. Materials like unmodified collagen and fetal stem cells! It’s open source, and launches at a price of $7500 USD.

Continue reading “3D Printing Organs is CLOSER thanks to Lulzbot BIO” »

I n August, three graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University were crammed together in a small, windowless basement lab, using a jury-rigged 3D printer frame to zap a slice of mouse brain with electricity.

The brain fragment, cut from the hippocampus, looked like a piece of thinly sliced garlic. It rested on a platform near the center of the contraption. A narrow tube bathed the slice in a solution of salt, glucose, and amino acids. This kept it alive, after a fashion: neurons in the slice continued to fire, allowing the experimenters to gather data. An array of electrodes beneath the slice delivered the electric zaps, while a syringe-like metal probe measured how the neurons reacted. Bright LED lamps illuminated the dish. The setup, to use the lab members’ lingo, was kind of hacky.

University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center just printed a 25-foot, 5,000-pound boat, the largest object that has ever been printed. The exorbitant act earned the college no less than three Guinness World Records.

The awards are as follows: one for the world’s largest prototype polymer 3D printer, one for the largest solid 3D-printed object, and one for the largest boat which has ever been produced by a 3D printer. The 3D printer is designed to print objects as long as 100 feet by 22 feet wide by 10 feet high, and can print at 500 pounds per hour.

Continue reading “World’s Biggest 3D-Printer Makes World’s Biggest 3D-Printed Boat” »

3D Printing was one example of how technological advancement made manufacturing accessible to all. Will robots take all the jobs? I doubt it, but technological advancement will make many things inaccessible, accessible to many more than before, by lowering the cost of production. This is but one example.

Better clear out several shelves of storage space, vinylheads, because your record collection is about to expand into infinity. Soon, you’ll be able to get absolutely anything on vinyl. Even better—you’ll be able to make it.

The Phonocut is an at-home vinyl lathe, allowing anyone with a digital audio file and a dream to make a 10-inch record.

Check out the new shape-shifting robot made out of “smarticiles” that show a new locomotive strategies!! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190918140759.htm ~via ScienceDaily… #churchofperpetuallife #perpetuallife #sciencedaily

Building conventional robots typically requires carefully combining components like motors, batteries, actuators, body segments, legs and wheels. Now, researchers have taken a new approach, building a robot entirely from smaller robots known as “smarticles” to unlock the principles of a potentially new locomotion technique.

The 3D-printed smarticles — short for smart active particles — can do just one thing: flap their two arms. But when five of these smarticles are confined in a circle, they begin to nudge one another, forming a robophysical system known as a “supersmarticle” that can move by itself. Adding a light or sound sensor allows the supersmarticle to move in response to the stimulus — and even be controlled well enough to navigate a maze.

Though rudimentary now, the notion of making robots from smaller robots — and taking advantage of the group capabilities that arise by combining individuals — could provide mechanically based control over very small robots. Ultimately, the emergent behavior of the group could provide a new locomotion and control approach for small robots that could potentially change shapes.

Using a new time-based method to control light from an ultrafast laser, researchers have developed a nanoscale 3D printing technique that can fabricate tiny structures 1000 times faster than conventional two-photon lithography (TPL) techniques, without sacrificing resolution.

Despite the high throughput, the new parallelized technique—known as femtosecond projection TPL (FP-TPL)—produces depth resolution of 175 nanometers, which is better than established methods and can fabricate structures with 90-degree overhangs that can’t currently be made. The technique could lead to manufacturing-scale production of bioscaffolds, flexible electronics, electrochemical interfaces, micro-optics, mechanical and optical metamaterials, and other functional micro- and nanostructures.

The work, reported Oct. 3 in the journal Science, was done by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Sourabh Saha, the paper’s lead and corresponding author, is now an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have designed 3D printed mesh-like structures that morph from flat layers into predetermined shapes, in response to changes in ambient temperature. The new structures can transform into configurations that are more complex than what other shape-shifting materials and structures can achieve.

As a demonstration, the researchers printed a flat mesh that, when exposed to a certain temperature difference, deforms into the shape of a human face. They also designed a mesh embedded with conductive liquid metal, that curves into a dome to form an active antenna, the resonance frequency of which changes as it deforms.

The team’s new design method can be used to determine the specific pattern of flat mesh structures to print, given the material’s properties, in order to make the structure transform into a desired shape.

Catalan designer eugeni quitllet is an acclaimed industrial designer who describes himself as a ‘disoñador,’ a spanish contraction of designer and dreamer. his invented future is gravity-free, with incredible aesthetics summarized in a combination of digital precision and flowing curves. eugeni creates bestselling objects between drawings and sculptures, mastering fullness and voids to reveal elegant silhouettes hidden in the material.

galaXsea envisions the first space solar sail boat 3D-printed in space.