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Factories at Home: The Present and Future of Multi-material Freeform Fabrication
Evan Malone, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA
Hod Lipson, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Computing & Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA
ABSTRACT - The history of freeform fabrication technology has been dominated by the invention and commercialization of proprietary processes and materials for producing homogeneous mechanical parts. This has led to costly systems employed only for niche applications, hindering the expansion and impact of what is conceptually a very simple, and yet a very powerful technology. Freeform fabrication systems which could deposit many materials should have the ability to fabricate complete integrated products - not merely parts. This would enable new product designs that take advantage of tight packaging, complex geometries and novel modes of form-function integration, including those previously available only to biological organisms. Moreover, if such manufacturing technology were simple and ubiquitous, it might drive a transition from an economy of mass-produced, globally transported products, to mass-developed, individually customized, point-of-use manufactured products.
We present here our two efforts to make this vision a reality. We have developed multi-material freeform fabrication systems and demonstrated their capability to produce not only mechanical parts, but complete and functional Zn-air batteries, electroactive polymer actuators, strain-gages, electrical wiring, organic-polymer transistors, electromechanical relays, engineered living tissues, and even food items. We have also developed and published the Fab@Home Model 1 open-source, multi-material, freeform fabrication system design. The Model 1 is simple and inexpensive enough for non-technical individuals to assemble and experiments with, but is capable of producing the full range of active devices demonstrated with our research system.
Biography
Evan Malone is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Mechanical Engineering in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, USA. He holds a BA degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, PA, USA, and a Masters of Engineering (M.Eng.) degree in mechanical engineering and systems engineering from Cornell University. He has worked in applied physics at the Fermilab high-energy physics laboratory in outside of Chicago, IL, USA as part of a proton accelerator conceptual design team, and performed research on mobile robotics as part of Cornell University's 2002 World Champion RoboCup autonomous robotic soccer project. His doctoral research involves developing multimaterial solid freeform fabrication (SFF) capable of producing complete electromechanical devices. He is also co-creator of the Fab@Home project, which promotes the advancement of personal automated fabrication technology by freely distributing designs and software which allow anyone to build and operate their own multi-material SFF system.
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