Week 12

  Week 12 {8.7.2021}

Hello!👋 We're back again after the shorrrt😭 term break. Anyways, back to the main topic, today we learnt about 3D printing as a continuation of product development. 3D printing is a type of digital fabrication. So what exactly is ''digital fabrication"? And what does it entail? Keep reading on to find out what we have learnt!

What is digital fabrication?🤷🏻‍♀️

Digital fabrication is a design and manufacturing workflow where digital data directly drives manufacturing equipment to form various part geometries. This data most often comes from CAD (computer-aided design), which is then transferred to CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) software. Basically, it is a manufacturing process aided by software. 

There are many different types of digital fabrication such as additive manufacturing➕, subtractive manufacturing➖ and robotic manipulation🤖. 3D printing is classified under additive manufacturing. 

Why digital fabrication?👩🏻‍🏫

So why is digital fabrication important? Well, as society advances and becomes increasingly digitized and globalised, many manufacturers are taking this progress in stride and progressively turning towards advanced manufacturing technologies. As competent workers of tomorrow, we need to learn about digital fabrication so we can engage in value-adding work. 

The advantages digital fabrication bring include:

• Customizable to individual needs
• Enable you to make the product/prototype whenever you need it
• Physically evaluate the prototype before committing to full-scale production
• Extend the lifespan of older equipment by printing obsolete parts
• Reverse-engineer spare parts
• Customisable high value/low volume end-use production

Examples of digital fabrication💻

Moving on to the most interesting part of the lesson, we talked about examples where digital manufacturing is utilised.

The first example is of the University of Connecticut (UConn) where chemical engineering students developed a prototype for an artificial kidney that makes use of 3D-printed parts and hollow fibre membrane technology.

Another example is of the Texas Tech University where a chemical engineering student discovered that only the Carbon Nanotubes infused in printable polymer filaments heat up quickly when exposed to microwave and hence can fuse together the layers in a 3D print making it stronger.

Activity Time!

For today's activity, we are to work in teams and adopt the peer-teaching learning model. Each group are given a certain topic related to 3D printing to research on. Each group will then prepare a small presentation at the end to peer-teach our classmates. After that, we had a small quiz to help us internalise the information we learnt from all the small presentations.

Our group was tasked with the following topic

Below is our presentation slides👍