Gentlereaders,

The is the first of what will be a number of posts written by our summer intern Alex Peraza.  Alex is a junior SUNY New Paltz and has designed his own major in Digital Design and Fabrication.  We are very excited about his project because we will finally be able to recycle the large amounts of scrap PLA and other materials we generate back into 3D printing filament.  I will let Alex take it from here.

Dan

 

 

The backbone of good design is iteration. Prototype, test, break, repeat—most designers would agree that nearly every designed object could be improved or optimized in some way. That is why rapid prototyping has had such an impact on the world of design, as it allows us to go from concept to a real tangible object within hours. Thermoplastics and the relatively practical ease of FDM printing has become ubiquitous in nearly every industry as well as within the maker community, which raises the question: what do we do with all that plastic waste?

As designers I believe it is our responsibility to always look for ways to make our products and techniques more sustainable at every level. As part of an ongoing project with our partners at the NoVo Foundation, we have recently begun looking into ways to recover our waste plastic and turn it back into usable filament using the full selection of equipment from the Vermont-based filament recycling company Filabot.

In the coming months, we will be posting updates on the project, tips and tricks we’ve learned along the way, and our thoughts on how we may implement this technology in the future.

Alex

My first exposure to the philosophical side of 3D printing was Fabricated  by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman.  It was an excellent introduction to the field in 2013, and still is.  This was where I first encountered the idea of being able to distribute manufacturing across many sites, which was described as Cloud Manufacturing.  I tend to prefer the term “distributed manufacturing”.  I don’t like “cloud storage” either, it makes it all sound so ethereal when it really is physical servers in an anonymous– looking warehouse somewhere.  Anyway, the idea is that anyone with a 3D printer can manufacture something.  If you have 5,000 people with printers connected through the internet, they can manufacture a lot of parts.  This was done world–wide at the beginning of the pandemic to manufacture PPE. The HVAMC was enthusiastic to participate with our 40+ printers as well as coordinate the design and logistics for a large group of public-spirited companies, schools, libraries and many people with their own home printers.  They are all listed here:  https://www.newpaltz.edu/hvamc/covid19faceshields/

 

I’m not going to repeat the details, as my colleague Aaron Nelson did an excellent job describing what happened at New Paltz here: (https://sites.newpaltz.edu/news/2020/10/aaron-nelson-academic-minute/).  However, I think it’s worth reflecting on why this is probably the only really good example of distributed manufacturing in the 10 years or so since affordable desktop 3D printers became available.   

 

First, face shields are easy to make.  I was honestly surprised that we really did run into a shortage since there are many industries that could easily retool to make them (and did), but the suddenness of the pandemic, the generational decrease in manufacturing capacity and the lack of national leadership all combined for a perfect storm.  Second, the only parts needed for our design, other than 3D printed parts,

were rubber bands and overhead transparencies so we were able to work around material shortages.  Third, desperation on the part of medical and civic authorities.  Our face shields were eventually cleared by infection control at a large regional hospital chain, but it was fairly clear that they would prefer getting a standard face shield from their normal suppliers. Fourth, several organizations stepped up to coordinate design and distribution as we did in the Mid-Hudson Valley.  I want to give credit to Stratasys‘ role at the national level in providing designs, free material and, most importantly for us, assurance that we weren’t breaking any FDA regulations!

 

The story also points out the limitations of distributed manufacturing with 3D printers.  With

everyone we know in our region going all–out printing face shields, we only shipped about 8000 and it was clear the demand was outstripping the supply.  Our fleet of Makerbots were also in pretty bad shape by the time we were done.  Fortunately, we started making plans early to scale up.  This required from help from traditional manufacturers and local companies IBM, USHECO and M-Tech Design stepped up big time and machined two different molds and started making parts by injection molding within 3 weeks.  Our role then became much more about logistics and shipping in order to deliver 25,000 face shields within six weeks.   

 

Th COVID emergency also pointed out where distributed manufacturing doesn’t work.  Face shields were not the only PPE that could be printed, and we kept an eye out for anything that could be useful.  A replacement for an N95 mask was the biggest need.  There were many designs, with the best I saw being a mask with a replace

able filter made from N95 material.  We printed a few samples for local hospitals, but there wasn’t much interest because they were having a hard time getting an appropriate fit or had concerns about sanitizing the material.  We also got a lot of requests/interest in printing parts to split a ventilator between multiple patients or even to make a DIY ventilator.  Fortunately, the situation never became desperate enough for these highly experimental and risky options.   

 

It was truly exciting to participate in the first effective experiment in distributed manufacturing and it was wonderful to see the variety of folks who were able and willing to dedicate their time and 3D printers.  In terms of distributed manufacturing, this crisis showed that under a particular set of conditions it can work but I don’t think we’re going to be using this approach to make aerospace or refrigerator parts anytime soon.   

 

Keep On Printing! 

 

Dan

You don’t have to look too hard at our website to realize that we’re big fans of Stratasys.  I have even more reason to be grateful to Stratasys since my friends Jesse Roitenberg (Stratasys) and Gina Scala (Allegheny Educational – our Stratasys, and just about everything else cool, reseller) brought their Mobile Showroom to SUNY New Paltz on Friday, April 30.   

Since nobody has gone to any trade shows for a while, this is a pretty awesome idea.  The visit was very timely for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s the end of a real kidney stone of a school year for everyone in higher education. Second, because of COVID, we’re not going anywhere, and nobody is coming here.  Bottom line, WE’RE KIND OF BORED!   

Looking over their mobile showroom, it’s clear that Stratasys has been busy.  The cleverest display was their new F770 FDM (https://www.stratasys.com/3d-printers/f770)  printer.  This is a large–scale printer with a 39.4” x 24” x 24” build volume, similar in size to the massive Fortus 900 while being much more affordable and geared towards lower

temperature materials like ABS and ASA.  There was no way this beast would fit in the trailer, so they built the front façade and door of the printer into a trailer wall with a photograph showing the interior of the printer.  I’ve always said that your build volume can never be big enough, but this is getting pretty close.  I want one, although we may have to use it for an office when we’re not printing. 

This was also our first look at the J55 printer launched last year.  This is a much more compact polyjet printer than our J735 while still retaining full pantone color capability.  The quality of the prints are amazing and I can see the small size and lower cost of this printer, relative to the J750/J735, bringing this technology to a wider variety of companies and educational institutions.  From a tech–geek point of view, what’s really unusual about this printer is that it’s not cartesian – the build plate is like an old-fashioned LP turntable (for those of you old enough to remember them) that rotates under a stationary print head.  That innovation probably made the small size possible, but I’m sure it created a lot of issues involving how angular velocity changes with radius.  Help, I’m getting flashbacks from general physics! 

They were also showing off the Origin One printer, a vat-style photopolymerization printer startup that Stratasys recently acquired.  Like with a lot of printers of this type, the part quality and precision are impressive.  Somewhat unusual for Stratasys, this printer is also designed to be open source with industry heavy hitters like BASF, or presumably anyone else who wants to formulate a resin, supplying the materials.  Kat, Aaron and I have debated a lot about this type of 3D printing.  Apart from Dungeons and Dragons characters, there are clear use cases in specific industries like dentistry, but the printer is being marketed for high-throughput final-use parts.  I’m sure there will be some good use cases, but these materials are very different than typical engineering plastics like ABS and polycarbonate with well understood properties.  You also only get break away supports, which does take some of the fun out of 3D printing.   

They also had a nice display of parts from Statasys Direct, both metal and polymer.  The overall takeaway is that Stratasys is working pretty hard to dominate in the manufacturing of polymer printers across all technologies and can print anything.   

If you get a chance to visit the Stratasys Mobile Showroom, do it.  Marketing at its best is both educational and fun – and this is both. Just one criticism, a tour should have t-shirts. 

 

Keep On Printing! 

Dan

We have, occasionally, obsessed about names.  For instance, the original name of the HVAMC was the Hudson Valley Advanced Manufacturing Center.  I’m still not quite sure where that came from, but I believe politics was involved.  Two years ago, at my colleague Kat Wilson’s suggestion, we changed advanced to additive.  This made a lot more sense, since additive manufacturing is part of advanced manufacturing, but there are a lot of areas in advanced manufacturing that are way outside of our wheelhouse and we do not like to claim unwarranted expertise.   

 

Our Digital Design and Fabrication program was another naming conundrum.  I’m not sure that we are even that happy with that name, it’s just the best we could think of at the time.  More sophisticated software tools and the advent of digital fabrication methods like laser cutting and 3D printing have blurred the lines between design, fabrication and manufacturing.  Rather than a designer turning something over to someone else to fabricate, it’s now possible for the designer to push a button and produce a prototype (ok, I know it’s not that easy, so more on that later…).  It’s even possible to keep pushing the button and create multiple identical copies.  Dictionary definitions of these words aren’t overly helpful.  I tend to think of fabrication as creating a one-of-a-kind object or small number of objects, whereas manufacturing is creating large numbers of objects that are identical within a certain known specification.  Colleges, of course, have a long history of fabrication across many different fields – art, engineering, science, design, architecture, etc.  What has changed is that 3D printers and similar devices have made it possible to create as many copies as you want, all made to a particular specification.   

With the 40 or so printers in our lab, we can make a lot of parts, so we are now in some middle ground between fabrication and manufacturing, thus fabrifacturing.  I guess it could also be called manufication, but that sounds vaguely like something you could get arrested for.   

Keep On Printing! 

 Dan

The Hudson Valley Additive Manufacturing Center (HVAMC) and the Digital Design and Fabrication (DDF) academic minor have been in existence for almost 8 years.  An explanation of what we do here is usually lengthy because we do not fit into any standard academic category.  That is something we take great pride in, by the way.  As my colleague Aaron Nelson puts it, “we’re not interdisciplinary, we’re antidisciplinary”.  We are also still reinventing what we do on a regular basis.  The Fabricator will be an attempt to explain what we do by describing some of the philosophy behind the direction(s) we are going in, as well as detailing some of the projects that we are working on.   

Let me introduce the HVAMC.  I will introduce the Digital Design and Fabrication program in a later post.   

The HVAMC is an academic center at the State University of New York at New Paltz (newpaltz.edu/hvamc) that focuses on additive manufacturing (the more formal term for 3D printing).  That doesn’t make us unique, but we are one of only a few academic 3D printing centers at a comprehensive university.  For those unfamiliar with academic inside baseball, a comprehensive university is typically a mid-size institution, focusing primarily on undergraduate programs, but with some Masters programs.  As opposed to the research mission of the larger universities, we focus mainly on teaching and supporting the Mid-Hudson Valley region economically.  This is core to what we do in the HVAMC.  We support campus design programs (art, engineering and our interdisciplinary Digital Design and Fabrication minor) by offering rapid prototyping on state-of-the-art 3D printers and expert advice about processes and materials.  We also support businesses and individuals in the community through these same services.  Over the years, we have worked with hundreds of manufacturers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, architects, inventors to help them use additive manufacturing in their businesses.  Along the way, we have broken ground in the academic use of additive manufacturing, being the first campus to open a Makerbot Innovation Center (a large array of desktop printers) and the first campus to be designated as an Stratasys Academic Superlab.   

 

The history of the HVAMC wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the community support that made it possible.  Our equipment was almost entirely financed by grants from Central Hudson Gas and Electric, the Dyson Foundation, Hudson River Ventures and an awesome group of local companies and alumni listed on our website.  And, of course, all of our customers and partners that have trusted us over the years with their time-sensitive and important projects.   

 

More next week! 

Keep on Printing, 

Dan