Here’s a link to a press release by CSIRO about their work towards printable electronics and in particular; printed solar cells. I hear there are teams of researchers all over the world in a race to bring this to market first.
If you have a commercial printing press running day and night printing photovoltaic cells on a thin polymer substrate, how long would it take to produce the generating capacity of a coal fired power station? Not all that long, maybe a day or two. These printed solar cells would be pretty cheap and you might be inclined to cover your whole roof with them and probably the exterior walls too. I’d cover everything I could with them to catch every skerrick of light.
This afternoon spent an hour with a few colleagues at Formero’s Melbourne office taking in a demonstration of an MTT rapid manufacturing machine doing titanium. Daniel Thomsen of Formero (formerly Aark Silhouette) told us this is the first installation for a bureau service in Australia. We were a bit crestfallen when we heard that RMIT uni has just bought the top of the range MTT machine through Daniel but hey! It was great to see the latest thing, handle parts and see all the systems that enable explosive powders to be safely processed. Here’s a good talk by someone from another company – same process and same capability. My friend Ken Barnett who has travelled to Europe on a fellowship studying this technology tells me the cost AU$0.8mil has fallen by half in three years. That’s good, ’cause I want one in my shed at home.
Here’s some research being done at the University of Ljubljana (what a lovely name!) into the way to enable robots to come out from behind the safety barrier and work alongside humans.
Chapter 3 of “Microengineering of Metals and Ceramics” is titled ‘Modeling Micro PIM’. The authors, A. Albers and J. Metz state that “advanced CAD promises a reduction in the extent of physical testing required to prototype a device.” Amen! That’s music to my ears as a seller of high end simulation software. The content of this chapter is quite familiar to me since I’m often talking to prospects about feedstock properties. Lets go over the chapter starting with their discussion of general principles. Read the rest of this entry »
This one is very impressive, I hope someone can come up with some peaceful commercial purposes before the usual military or tyrannical law enforcement applications.
This video shows a great way to interact with a CAD program via a virtual reality interface. This is half way to the Robert Downy Jnr. trick in Iron Man II.
Google Chrome is pretty quick. How quick? Check this out.
Microspecific design has limits which are imposed by the available technologies and these limits need to be applied rigorously. The authors of the book mentioned in the previous post have built a database to apply a methodology they call knowledge based engineering or KBE. Here’s a link to this chapter of the book. A flowchart shows how and when the rules are applied. Unigraphics, a CAD program has a module called “knowledge fusion” which can automatically apply these rules during the modeling session. A system of numbers and letters can describe the manufacturing process and the rules that have been applied.
Put simply; its no use designing something that can’t be built and its handy to have the CAD system beep when you err.
The Swinburne University library is good to staff. This two volume book is way outside a teachers means but they figure my students will benefit. And they will. These Germans have gone where I’m going but on a grander scale (though smaller). I’ll blog through this book chapter by chapter since I plan to follow in their footsteps but with one difference – I want to do this with commercially viable projects rather than live on research grants.
As the book appears on Amazon
Yesterday I visited Toyota at their design centre in Port Melbourne, Australia and checked out a display of imported components that they’d like to source locally. I’m scouting for opportunities for Kurt, the moulder in our demo project. A colleague alerted me to the existence of the display Read the rest of this entry »
