Getting the carbon out of emissions

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Getting 3-D Printing and Next-Generation Manufacturing to the Factory Floor [Video]

The White House’s budget promises millions of dollars to build a solid foundation for additive manufacturing

By Larry Greenemeier

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GAUNTLET THROWN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers made this robotic prosthesis (and the ball it's holding) using an additive manufacturing process known as electron-beam melting (EBM). Image: Image courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory

"Additive manufacturing" offers manufacturers a powerful set of tools for making any number of products cost-effectively and with little waste, a groundbreaking development that promises to help revitalize the U.S. manufacturing sector. But what will it take to get the process out of the lab and onto the factory floor? A generous cash infusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, will help—and it is now in the offing.

Pres. Barack Obama's State of the Union Address and, more recently, his proposed budget for fiscal 2014 lift U.S. manufacturing’s needs to near the top of the agenda. And unlike the low-tech production and assembly jobs that U.S. companies have been outsourcing for decades, the new age of manufacturing will rely heavily on additive-manufacturing technologies and materials, which are slated to receive millions of dollars in funding to move them out of the lab and onto the factory floor.

3-D printing is the most widely recognized version of additive manufacturing. Inventors and engineers have for years used machines costing anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands to rapidly prototype new products. All of the additive-manufacturing processes follow the same basic layer-by-layer deposition principle in slightly different ways using powdered or liquid polymers, metals or other materials. Each object begins as computer-aided design (CAD) or some other type of digital file, enabling designers to tweak their work prior to the actual build with little impact on cost.

At the low end of the scale, a MakerBot 3-D printer can build basic items like a hair comb or statue using polymer-based filaments. Industrial-scale, production-quality airplane or automobile parts, however, require additive machines and materials that don't currently exist. That’s where the funding comes in.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s fiscal 2014 budget request in particular includes $1.5 billion in that year alone to spur the development of new approaches to manufacturing (pdf) on top of the $1 billon investment the Obama administration committed to in fiscal 2013 to launch the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, a group of up to 15 manufacturing research facilities across the country.

The first is the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII) in Youngstown, Ohio, which will focus on development of additive-manufacturing technology and processes with help from a planned $45 million in federal funding. The Defense and Energy departments have already provided $30 million of that amount, with NASA, Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Science Foundation expected to kick in the remaining $15 million over the next four years. Manufacturing firms, universities, community colleges and nonprofit organizations have promised the institute an additional $40 million in funding.

The institute already has seven projects in the works. These efforts range from basic research about how polymers and other materials will react during the heating and deposition process to more industrial applications, such as developing a lower-cost, high-temperature process for working with thermoplastics used to make air and space vehicle components.

The animation below shows how one type of additive-manufacturing process—electron-beam melting (EBM)—works. EBM begins with powdered metal alloy placed in the machine’s powder hopper. The machine’s rake distributes a fine layer of powder across the build platform. An electron beam enters the vacuum chamber and melts the particles in a pattern as dictated by a CAD file. The build platform is then lowered slightly and the process repeats until the object—in this case, a turbine—has been fully printed.

There are several areas where the process could be improved, provided the government’s money is well spent: In addition to speeding up the procedure, manufacturers need to make sure these printed products are consistent from one assembly to the next. They must also develop ways to make more complex, detailed and multi-material objects. Still, with additive manufacturing on the national radar—and, more importantly, in the budget—it’s only a matter of time before most parts are printed rather than carved out of raw materials.

Animation courtesy of George Retseck (Source: Arcam.com)

View the original article here

Getting 3-D Printing and Next-Generation Manufacturing to the Factory Floor [Video]

The White House’s budget promises millions of dollars to build a solid foundation for additive manufacturing

By Larry Greenemeier

$(document).ready(function () {if ($(window).width() $(function() { var offset = $("#shareFloat").offset(); var topPadding = 60; $(window).scroll(function() { if ($(window).scrollTop() > (offset.top - '30')) { $('#shareFloat').css('top', $(window).scrollTop() - offset.top + topPadding); } else { $('#shareFloat').css('top','20px').css('left','-88px'); }; }); });reddit_url='http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=3-d-printing-next-generation-manufacturing'

GAUNTLET THROWN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers made this robotic prosthesis (and the ball it's holding) using an additive manufacturing process known as electron-beam melting (EBM). Image: Image courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory

"Additive manufacturing" offers manufacturers a powerful set of tools for making any number of products cost-effectively and with little waste, a groundbreaking development that promises to help revitalize the U.S. manufacturing sector. But what will it take to get the process out of the lab and onto the factory floor? A generous cash infusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, will help—and it is now in the offing.

Pres. Barack Obama's State of the Union Address and, more recently, his proposed budget for fiscal 2014 lift U.S. manufacturing’s needs to near the top of the agenda. And unlike the low-tech production and assembly jobs that U.S. companies have been outsourcing for decades, the new age of manufacturing will rely heavily on additive-manufacturing technologies and materials, which are slated to receive millions of dollars in funding to move them out of the lab and onto the factory floor.

3-D printing is the most widely recognized version of additive manufacturing. Inventors and engineers have for years used machines costing anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands to rapidly prototype new products. All of the additive-manufacturing processes follow the same basic layer-by-layer deposition principle in slightly different ways using powdered or liquid polymers, metals or other materials. Each object begins as computer-aided design (CAD) or some other type of digital file, enabling designers to tweak their work prior to the actual build with little impact on cost.

At the low end of the scale, a MakerBot 3-D printer can build basic items like a hair comb or statue using polymer-based filaments. Industrial-scale, production-quality airplane or automobile parts, however, require additive machines and materials that don't currently exist. That’s where the funding comes in.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s fiscal 2014 budget request in particular includes $1.5 billion in that year alone to spur the development of new approaches to manufacturing (pdf) on top of the $1 billon investment the Obama administration committed to in fiscal 2013 to launch the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, a group of up to 15 manufacturing research facilities across the country.

The first is the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII) in Youngstown, Ohio, which will focus on development of additive-manufacturing technology and processes with help from a planned $45 million in federal funding. The Defense and Energy departments have already provided $30 million of that amount, with NASA, Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Science Foundation expected to kick in the remaining $15 million over the next four years. Manufacturing firms, universities, community colleges and nonprofit organizations have promised the institute an additional $40 million in funding.

The institute already has seven projects in the works. These efforts range from basic research about how polymers and other materials will react during the heating and deposition process to more industrial applications, such as developing a lower-cost, high-temperature process for working with thermoplastics used to make air and space vehicle components.

The animation below shows how one type of additive-manufacturing process—electron-beam melting (EBM)—works. EBM begins with powdered metal alloy placed in the machine’s powder hopper. The machine’s rake distributes a fine layer of powder across the build platform. An electron beam enters the vacuum chamber and melts the particles in a pattern as dictated by a CAD file. The build platform is then lowered slightly and the process repeats until the object—in this case, a turbine—has been fully printed.

There are several areas where the process could be improved, provided the government’s money is well spent: In addition to speeding up the procedure, manufacturers need to make sure these printed products are consistent from one assembly to the next. They must also develop ways to make more complex, detailed and multi-material objects. Still, with additive manufacturing on the national radar—and, more importantly, in the budget—it’s only a matter of time before most parts are printed rather than carved out of raw materials.

Animation courtesy of George Retseck (Source: Arcam.com)

View the original article here

Safety reflector technology from footwear getting new life in detecting bioterror threats

Tiny versions of the reflectors on sneakers and bicycle fenders that help ensure the safety of runners and bikers at night are moving toward another role in detecting bioterrorism threats and diagnosing everyday infectious diseases, scientists said today.

Their report on progress in using these innovative "retroreflectors"—the same technology that increases the night-time visibility of traffic signs—was among almost 12,000 on the agenda of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

"Our goal is the development of an ultrasensitive, all-in-one device that can quickly tell first-responders exactly which disease-causing microbe has been used in a bioterrorism attack," said Richard Willson, Ph.D., who leads the research. "In the most likely kind of attack, large numbers of people would start getting sick with symptoms that could be from multiple infectious agents. But which one? The availability of an instrument capable of detecting several agents simultaneously would greatly enhance our response to a possible bioterror attack or the emergence of a disease not often seen here."

Willson's team is developing another version of the technology intended for use in doctors' offices and clinics for rapid, on-site diagnosis of common infectious diseases before patients leave. Eliminating the need to wait for test results from an outside laboratory could allow patients to get the right treatment sooner and recover sooner, Willson noted.

One of those tests focuses on detecting norovirus, the dreaded "cruise ship virus," or "winter vomiting virus," which strikes more than 20 million people annually in the United States alone. Norovirus was in the headlines last December when it struck 220 people on the Queen Mary II.

Balakrishnan Raja, the member of Willson's team at the University of Houston (UH) who presented the report, pointed out that retroreflectors may be the most visually detectable devices ever made by humanity. They work on the project with colleagues at UH, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the Sandia National Laboratories branch in Livermore, Calif. The devices reflect light directly back to its source in a way that produces extreme brightness. One version of retroreflection effect occurs when someone shines a flashlight in a mirror. The reflection is so bright that looking at it hurts.

Although most people have never heard the term "retroreflector," these devices are not new, Raja pointed out. The Apollo 11 astronauts, for instance, left a laser-ranging retroreflector on the moon during the first lunar landing mission in 1969. Scientists still use the device to study the moon's orbit. And they are ubiquitous fixtures in road signs, traffic lane markers and elsewhere in everyday life.

Willson's collaborator Paul Ruchhoeft of UH has developed a way of making retroreflectors so small that more than 200 would fit inside the period at the end of this sentence. The retroreflectors then become part of a lab-on-a-chip, or a microfluidic device, with minute channels for processing "microliter"-scale amounts of blood or other fluids. A microliter is one-millionth of a liter (a liter is about one quart). A drop of water contains about 50 microliters.

When a sample of fluid that doesn't contain disease-causing viruses or bacteria flows through those channels to the retroreflectors, they shine brightly. A sample containing bacteria, however, makes portions of the reflectors go dark, signaling a positive test result. Raja explained that the change from bright to dark is one of several advantages of the retroreflector technology, compared to existing ways of detecting disease-causing microbes. It can be detected with simple optical devices, rather than expensive, complex optics. The retroreflector technology also avoids the need to specially prepare samples for analysis and is faster.

"Right now, we have seven channels in our device," Raja said. "So we can test for seven different infections at once, but we could make more channels. That's one of our long-term goals—to multiplex the device and detect many pathogens at once."

They have demonstrated clinically useful sensitivity on samples containing Rickettsia conorii, a bioterrorism threat that causes Mediterranean spotted fever, and others are on the agenda. A new version of the technology involves retroreflector cubes that can be suspended in samples of fluid. Willson's team initially will use it on norovirus with the goal of developing a device that can raise a red flag on norovirus viral contamination and prevent the disease's wildfire-like spread.

More information: Abstract

Ultrasensitive and rapid pathogen detection generally relies on nucleic acid extraction followed by amplification, or labeling with dyes, enzymes or fluors, which require elaborate instrumentation. This work introduces embedded, microfabricated linear retroreflectors as bio-sensing surfaces, using micron-sized magnetic particles as light-blocking labels in a highly sensitive diagnostic immunoassay. Retroreflectors return light directly to its source and are easily detectable using inexpensive optics. The pathogen is immunocaptured by a sensing surface following immunomagnetic separation and concentration from a complex sample. An automated difference imaging algorithm that detects single 3.0 µm magnetic particles without optical calibration is used to quantify the number of labels bound to each from each 1 sq. mm. array of retroreflectors. An assay for the detection of Rickettsia conorii is implemented in a microfluidic format with fluidic force discrimination to enhance reproducibility and specificity, with a current limit of detection of less than 4000 bacteria per mL.

Provided by American Chemical Society

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