The extraordinary power of 3D printing
Three-dimensional printing has the potential to change how products are designed, manufactured and consumed.
This was the idea at the centre of a presentation given by third-year Mechanical and Industrial Engineering student Gavin Kenneally to engineering faculty and students on April 6.
3D printing technology — which “prints” an object, instead of a two-dimensional image, one layer at a time — has existed since the 1980s, but has required bulky, expensive machines that use its primary publishing material plastic powders that yield fragile products.
Now, Kenneally says, 3D printing equipment is getting smaller and less expensive and can handle different and more durable materials, such as stainless steel and glass. He points to recent work at Cornell University that has tested printing electrically-conductive materials, and researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina who are even experimenting with the 3D printing of human organs.
3D printing hardware can be constructed using open-source files found online as a blueprint — something Kenneally himself did with the 3D printer that sits on his desk at home.
With this “sea change of manufacturing and design,” Kenneally says a smart and resourceful designer can complete every step of the production process — serving not only as designer, but also engineer, manufacturer, distributor, product tester, and end-user.
Kenneally says this concept and technology has many benefits, including the potential to reduce waste or eradicate lengthy shipping bottlenecks at borders. Eventually it might even create a perfectly fitting pair of shoes custom-moulded for one’s feet.
This was the same message he had delivered at the TEDxConcordia event this past February. Based on TED Talks, the events feature speakers presenting, in the words of the originators, “ideas worth spreading”. Kenneally’s post-TEDxConcordia Faculty talk was more technical albeit, to reflect the audience’s engineering savvy.
He was invited to give the repeat performance to Concordia’s engineering community by Mechanical and Industrial Engineering professor Paula Wood-Adams, who has been supervising his research into 3D printing since September.
Design and engineering, says Kenneally, “might seem like the two fields that are separate or exclusive, but there’s so much crossover. I like to present them as if they're one and the same.”
“Gavin is doing and learning so much more by making use of the university, the people, the facilities and opportunities such as TEDx,” says Wood-Adams. “To me, this is a perfect example of getting every possible bit out of an undergraduate education.”
This summer, Kenneally will be interning at the University of Pennsylvania. He’ll be working in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, one of the United States’ best-known laboratories for biomimetics — the study and development of synthetic systems that mimic biologically-produced substances, materials, mechanisms and processes.
Kenneally will return to Concordia this fall for the fourth year of his degree.
To fully understand the power of 3D printing, watch Gavin Kenneally’s presentation at TEDxConcordia, February 19, 2011 at the Eric Maclean S.J. Centre for the Performing Arts near the Loyola Campus:
Related links:
• “No More Roads Less Travelled?” - Concordia Journal, September 27, 2010
• “TED 2011: Print-on-Demand Organs the Future of Medicine” - Wired magazine, March 7, 2011
• Concordia Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science
• TEDxConcordia