Global Fastener News

9/9/2013 12:17:00 AM
FEATURE

Editor’s Note:  This week FIN will publish the story of how one fastener company is using 3D printing to update the fastener industry. Come back to GlobalFastenerNews.com for the details of that fastener company with a history of innovation dating back to a spring steel fastener invented to solve an issue with shipping stoves in the 1930s. 

Academia is researching materials innovation is surging and American manufacturing faces a transformation at the hands of the “maker” movement to get ready for 3D manufacturing.

University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of mechanical engineering and computer sciences Vadim Shapiro and Drexel University professor of engineering and computer science William Regli are pursuing the building blocks for computational tools that would allow manufacturers to account for the material complexity of a sophisticated product within a single computer model.

Shapiro and Regli are working with an $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and they want to establish a new discipline they call the “informatics of making.”

“We’re not just talking about computing systems, but specifically computing systems in support of material activities,” Shapiro said.  “Moving forward requires computational models that know about geometry, materials and physics.”

Regli said that as the 3D printing world begins to buzz about such possibilities as printing an entire house, it’s becoming clear that computational design tools need to catch up to advances in materials science.

“If I want to design an object that has variable material properties, on a 3D printer, the tools just don’t exist,” Regli said. “What you’re making is more than a shape; it’s how the shape responds to its physical environment — for example, how it acts under certain forces.”

Currently, when 3D printer users exchange data on an object they’re trying to print, they use what Shapiro refers to as a “dumb” file, one that simply transmits an approximate shape of an object. The next step is to create models and languages that also include information about the materials, physics and design intent.  

“It’s almost at the point where you can interchangeably think of materials as bits of information,” Shapiro said.

Regli said the main challenge is to find the right abstractions with which to unite principles of design, materials and computing. “We have to figure out how to relate the representations for material and behavior from an engineering standpoint to the computational representations,” Regli said.

That would establish a framework in which manufacturers and engineers can build powerful new tools that harness the potential of three fast-rising scientific disciplines.  ©2013 GlobalFastenerNews.com