Last week, SME and Stratasys Ltd. announced the winners of this year’s additive manufacturing student competition held at the 54th annual SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference in Louisville, Kentucky.
During the past four years, SME and Stratasys have collaborated on the Additive Manufacturing Competition — a contest designed to stimulate student knowledge of additive manufacturing and 3D printing techniques. This year’s contest included 44 teams representing high schools, colleges/universities and career technical institutions — each competing for a chance to take home a gold, silver or bronze medal. Prizes include scholarships from the SME Education Foundation (for high school participants), a one-year Tooling U-SME subscription, RAPID + TCT conference passes, Solidworks’ 3D-CAD design software and a MakerBot Mini printer.
“The SkillsUSA Additive Manufacturing Competition allows students to explore and apply promising emerging additive technologies that are increasingly used in manufacturing operations,” said Jeff Krause, executive director and CEO of SME. “SME and Stratasys have built a competition that is inspiring and attracting tomorrow’s manufacturing workforce.”
This year’s challenge focused on solving a real-life medical problem for a veteran who endured a traumatic thumb amputation on his left hand. As part of the contest, students watched an introductory video to learn about the patient’s disability, assessed his current condition and determined how each could design an adaptive device enabling the veteran to continue using his PlayStation 3 gaming system. The winning devices consisted of 3D-printed parts designed to allow the veteran to comfortably use a PlayStation 3 controller, without his current silicone prosthetic.
This past week I had the pleasure of attending RAPID + TCT 2018, a conference and exhibition that showcases 3D printing/additive manufacturing with a myriad new technologies, materials, and processes. The event, put on by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) is a highlight of the year for us, and again, we came away overwhelmed (in a very good way) by all that we witnessed.
Much like last year, if there were three words to describe the SME’s RAPID + TCT 3D Printing & Manufacturing Event they would be metal, metal, and metal — machines producing metal parts were everywhere. This year marked the 28th event and seemed more like a mini IMTS than an additive manufacturing show with exhibitors ranging from material suppliers to post processors to traditional machining companies. There were, of course, the industry heavy hitters, but there were also a lot of startup companies exhibiting for the first time that made things really interesting.
Post-processing also got a lot of exposure as companies providing these technologies had more of a presence and recognizing that this important aspect of AM needs to be an integral part of the production process, and not relegated to being an afterthought.
This year’s theme was “3D In 360°,” meaning the industry is starting to come full circle in terms of capabilities and potential, and this theme was clearly evident in the technical sessions and on the exhibit show floor. This year continued a distinct change of industry direction from one-off rapid prototyping of parts to production quantities in the hundreds and even thousands.
The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), a nonprofit organization that supports the manufacturing industry, and Stratasys Ltd. announced the winners of a student additive manufacturing competition held during the 53rd annual SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference.
The SkillsUSA Additive Manufacturing Competition is a student contest co-sponsored by the organizations to attract the future workforce to this growing field and allow contestants to get hands-on experience using the latest 3D printing software and technology, such as the new Stratasys F123 Series. The competition was held at the 53rd annual SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference, and six teams took home gold, silver and bronze medals for fulfilling all of the contest requirements.
Now in its third year, the 2017 Additive Manufacturing Competition consisted of 34 high school and post-secondary student teams competing for a chance to take home gold, silver, or bronze medals – as well as scholarships from the SME Education Foundation, and a MakerBot Mini printer. The Additive Manufacturing Competition was created to stimulate student learning of additive manufacturing and 3D printing techniques.
“Each year, we attract more students to participate in the SkillsUSA Additive Manufacturing Competition and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the growth,” said Jeff Krause, executive director and CEO of SME. “This is an exciting time for additive manufacturing and 3D printing and we are proud to be at the forefront of its evolution and making sure our future manufacturing leaders will be prepared for what lies ahead as the industry progresses.”
The 2017 Additive Manufacturing Competition involved designing and printing a track piece (fixture) capable of moving a marble to a designated location after the ball rolls down a ramp. The fixture was required to connect with the ramp at specific points and remain stable for the test’s duration. Each team was provided time to design the fixture, build the 3D printed prototype on a Stratasys 3D printer, and make any necessary design modifications the next day. (more…)
We’ve been in Long Beach, California all week at SME’s RAPID 2015 conference and exhibition. If you want to learn what’s new exciting in things 3D, this is the place to be. Hardware and software vendors, service providers, distributors and resellers, and educational institutions all showcase new offerings in 3D printing, scanning, and additive and subtractive manufacturing.
RAPID is an interesting mix of industry experts, pundits, users, and people just curious about this fascinating 3D world that continues to grow at an exponential rate. This year about 4,000 attended RAPID with almost 200 exhibitors
RAPID is about the most recent developments in the field, as well as what may be coming in the future. A number of technologies, techniques, and innovations are discussed during technical sessions, but this year, we found among the most interesting topics to be 3D bioprinting and 3D printing in space.
The first morning’s keynote was made by Jason Dunn, CTO of Made In Space, who talked on the topic of “Bringing Additive Manufacturing to Space.” The company was founded in 2010 with the goal of enabling humanity’s future in space. It has developed additive manufacturing (AM) technology specifically for use in the space environment (no easy task). By manufacturing space assets in space, as opposed to launching them from Earth, the company is attempting to accelerate and broaden space development while also providing unprecedented access for people on Earth to use in-space capabilities (the ultimate goal of a business model to monetize its cash outlay in space on earth).
We’re heading to Long Beach, California next week to participate in one of SME’s marquee events — RAPID 2015.
I’ll be at the conference all week taking in the keynotes, new hardware and software products and service announcements, as well as sitting in on a few technical sessions.
This is an especially pivotal year in the evolution of 3D printing as it strives to get to the next level with higher quality parts, lower cost materials, and greater presence in manufacturing direct part production.
I’ll be hitting the floor running early Tuesday morning and will be Tweeting throughout the event, as well as posting blogs at the end of each day.
If you’re going to RAPID 2015 in Long Beach, feel free to contact me at 719.221.1867 or jeff@ibsystems.com and let’s meet up for discussing the latest technologies, trends, rumors, etc.
I’ve been around design and engineering for many years. Well, you might say that I’ve been “around the block.” I can accept that, but I also have realized for a long time, that to remain relevant, I have had to continuously re-educate myself through various channels to reinvent myself.
Just last autumn I took a computational physics course (Optics) at the University of Colorado Denver as background for a book I am in the process of writing on 3D scanning. To say it was a challenge is an understatement, and I had to dust off my old college math books, but I got a lot out of it and look forward to future college-level courses. Disclosure: I audited the course and did not receive a grade, but felt I kept up with the class, and missed only two classes during the 16 week semester.
During the most recent SolidWorks World we saw some presentations and live demos of some amazing flying robots, and we discussed them last month. Thanks to the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), we came across another stunning example of flying robots. This time, though, at a much smaller scale as printed circuit micro-electro-mechanical systems (PC-MEMS).
Dubbed the Monolithic Bee (Mobee), and created by engineers at Harvard, a unique layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just these flying microrobots, but potentially a broad range of other electromechanical devices.
The new fabrication technique was inspired by pop-up books and origami, allowing clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet.
In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton (a plastic film), titanium, brass, ceramic, and adhesive sheets have been laminated together in a complex, laser-cut design. The structure incorporates flexible hinges that allow the three-dimensional product—2.4 millimeters tall—to assemble in one movement, like a pop-up book.
The entire product is approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, and dozens of these microrobots can be fabricated in parallel on a single sheet.
“This takes what is a craft, an artisanal process, and transforms it for automated mass production,” said Pratheev Sreetharan, who co-developed the technique with J. Peter Whitney at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
Sreetharan, Whitney, and their colleagues in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at SEAS have been working to build bio-inspired, bee-sized robots that can fly and behave autonomously as a colony. Appropriate materials, hardware, control systems, and fabrication techniques did not exist prior to the RoboBees project, so each must be invented, developed, and integrated by a diverse team of researchers.
Although tiny robots can now be built by slightly bigger robots, designing how all of the layers will fit together and fold is still a very labor-intensive human task. Standard computer-aided design (CAD) tools, typically intended for either flat, layered circuit boards or 3D objects, do not yet support devices that combine both, but that is changing.
However, once a design is complete, fabrication can be fully automated to highly accurate and precise standards.
The Harvard Office of Technology Development is now developing a strategy to commercialize this technology. The work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the National Science Foundation (through the Expeditions in Computing program), and the Wyss Institute.
Admittedly, the video is more about fabricating the Mobee than it is about it actually flying, but it’s still some interesting stuff. If we come across video that shows the Mobee flying maneuvers, we’ll post it.
