Circa 2016
Clothing of the future could have the ability to repair itself after a tear – all you need to do is add water.
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A Dutch couple have become the proud new tenants of the country’s first ever 3D-printed house.
Elize Lutz and Harrie Dekkers have been given the digital key to the gray, boulder-shaped building in the Bosrijk neighborhood of Eindhoven, in the southern Netherlands.
The single-story home has more than 1000 square feet of floor area, with a spacious living room and two bedrooms.
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The U. S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and American Semiconductor have combined traditional manufacturing techniques with 3D printed circuitry to produce a flexible Silicon-on-polymer chip.
Besides its material qualities, the new chip has a memory more than 7000 times larger than any comparable commercially available devices, making it suitable as a micro-controller to be integrated into other objects.
Graphene excels at removing contaminants from water, but it’s not yet a commercially viable use of the wonder material.
That could be changing.
In a recent study, University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing graphene aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles—scalability and creating a version of the material that’s stable enough for repeated use—for water treatment.
UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, the breakthrough involves utilizing a special class of materials that manipulates how thermal radiation travels through such materials.
Recently published in Science, the advance could be used to improve the efficiency of energy-conversion systems and enable more effective sensing and detection technologies.
“Our goal was to show that we could effectively beam thermal radiation —the heat all objects emanate as electromagnetic waves —over broad wavelengths to the same direction,” said study leader Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This advance offers new capabilities for a range of technologies that depend on the ability to control the flows of heat in the form of thermal radiation. This includes imaging and sensing applications that rely on thermal sources or detecting them, as well as energy applications such as solar heating, waste heat recovery and radiative cooling, where restricting the directionality of heat flow can improve performance. ”.
“Multiple printers constructed the building in 200 hours using local soil, meaning it’s zero-waste and needed no materials to be transported to the site.”
Fred Oesch.
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Interfaith solutions for major global challenges — bawa jain — founder, the centre for responsible leadership.
Bawa Jain is a visionary leader in the interfaith movement throughout the world.
3D printing has opened up a completely new range of possibilities. One example is the production of novel turbine buckets. However, the 3D printing process often induces internal stress in the components, which can, in the worst case, lead to cracks. Now a research team has succeeded in using neutrons from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) research neutron source for non-destructive detection of this internal stress—a key achievement for the improvement of the production processes.
Gas turbine buckets have to withstand extreme conditions: Under high pressure and at high temperatures they are exposed to tremendous centrifugal forces. In order to further maximize energy yields, the buckets have to hold up to temperatures which are actually higher than the melting point of the material. This is made possible using hollow turbine buckets which are air-cooled from the inside.
These turbine buckets can be made using laser powder bed fusion, an additive manufacturing technology: Here, the starter material in powder form is built up layer by layer by selective melting with a laser. Following the example of avian bones, intricate lattice structures inside the hollow turbine buckets provide the part with the necessary stability.
**A lobster’s underbelly is lined with a thin, translucent membrane that is both stretchy and surprisingly tough.** This marine under-armor, as MIT engineers reported in 2019, is made from the toughest known hydrogel in nature, which also happens to be highly flexible. This combination of strength and stretch helps shield a lobster as it scrabbles across the seafloor, while also allowing it to flex back and forth to swim.
A lobster’s underbelly is lined with a thin, translucent membrane that is both stretchy and surprisingly tough. This marine under-armor, as MIT engineers reported in 2019, is made from the toughest known hydrogel in nature, which also happens to be highly flexible. This combination of strength and stretch helps shield a lobster as it scrabbles across the seafloor, while also allowing it to flex back and forth to swim.
Now a separate MIT team has fabricated a hydrogel-based material that mimics the structure of the lobster’s underbelly. The researchers ran the material through a battery of stretch and impact tests, and showed that, similar to the lobster underbelly, the synthetic material is remarkably “fatigue-resistant,” able to withstand repeated stretches and strains without tearing.
Imagine a foldable smartphone or a rollable tablet device that is powerful, reliable and, perhaps most importantly, affordable.
New research directed by Wake Forest University scientists and published today in the journal Nature Communications has led to a method for both pinpointing and eliminating the sources of instability in the materials and devices used to create such applications.
“In this work, we introduced a strategy that provides a reliable tool for identifying with high accuracy the environmental and operational device degradation pathways and subsequently eliminating the main sources of instabilities to achieve stable devices,” said lead author Hamna Iqbal, a graduate student who worked closely with Professor of Physics Oana Jurchescu on the research.
