GROWit 3D

Laser sintering...with carbon.

Process: Laser Sintering

Material: carbonGRO 640

Full Color 3D Printing

From powder bed to functioning amplifier...3D printing is awesome.

NATURE’S way in the snowflake realm is much closer to our methods here at GROWit. An ADDITIVE, not subtractive, method is employed in nature to create a snowflake.

Snowflakes form from water vapor as it condenses into ice right inside a cloud. They begin to take their shape (or GROW if you are willing to sub in our additive term) as water vapor molecules freeze on the surface of a seed crystal. Pattern & design begins to appear as the crystal GROWs (molecule after molecule).

Since its first public appearance in 2012, Google Glass, the companies augmented reality headset, has creates quite a buzz.  Made of a stamp sized transparent plastic, a thin wire frame and a one sided ear wire, Google glass will allow users to experience Google’s search, maps, and other features in real-time.

Now that the project has reached an advanced prototyping phase Google has started to use 3D printers to custom fit each Glass prototype to the wearer.  It isn’t clear what type of sizing Glass will have when it eventually reaches the market, but with the amount of money Google has, maybe they’ll custom print each order.

According to Google, Glass will begin rolling out to developers for testing in the coming months.

Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician famous for creating numerous inventions, laying the foundations for calculus and for determining the areas and volumes of just about everything, has been resurrected with the help of to two Harvard mathematicians and a 3D printer. In order to pay homage to the great thinker, Elizabeth Slavkovsky and Oliver Knill took some of his most notable mathematical proofs and ideas and printed them in 3D.

Of these proofs is Archimedes personal favorite, which illustrates that the volume of a sphere is ⅔ the volume of a cylinder with the same height and diameter and that the same is true for the surface areas of both shapes.  This insight was so important to the philosopher that he had his tomb marked with a sphere circumscribed by a cylinder.  Slavkovsky and Knill, thus, found it appropriate to replicate the relationship in 3D, printing a model with a half-sphere placed on the top of a cylinder, creating an object they call “The Drinkable Proof”.  As water is poured through the top of the sculpture, it fills exactly ⅓ of the cylinder (the volume of ½ a sphere).

Pictured above is a 3D printed model of the famous Archimedes screw. The inventor was commissioned by King Hiero II to find a way to keep his ancient Greek luxury cruiser, the Syracruisia, afloat, despite its huge mass.  Wikipedia describes the story of the innovation this way, “The Syracusia is said to have been the largest ship built in classical antiquity. According to Athenaeus, it was capable of carrying 600 people and included garden decorations, a gymnasium and a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite among its facilities. Since a ship of this size would leak a considerable amount of water through the hull, the Archimedes screw was purportedly developed in order to remove the bilge water.”

Slavkovsky believes that such 3D printed models might vastly improve mathematics education by providing tangible examples of mathematical principles and complex shapes. Digital models and hand drawings provide some insight into geometry, but being able to hold and feel the shapes bring these otherwise abstract ideas into the world of the real, making the concepts taught in high-level math more relevant to everyday life.

If you’re interested in trying to print The Drinkable Proof yourself, you can find the instructions mathematics to do so in a program called Mathematica here.

A little over a year ago, 3D printing was a funky new technology that you might find at modestly sized booths in the basement level of the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES. Tonight, President Obama mentioned it in the same breath as Apple and Intel during his State of the Union address, while talking about ways to create new jobs and manufacturing in the United States. Here's the passage from the transcript:

After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. After locating plants in other countries like China, Intel is opening its most advanced plant right here at home. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.  There are things we can do, right now, to accelerate this trend. Last year, we created our first manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio. A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything. There's no reason this can't happen in other towns.

The notion that Youngstown, Ohio, is the epicenter of the 3D-printing revolution probably came as news to many people who have never heard of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute that the president referenced. Additive manufacturing is the industry term for 3D printing, and NAMII, as it's known, has been collecting some big checks during the past year to become a hub for pushing 3D printing beyond a means for creating innumerable themed chess sets.

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The Department of Defense provided $30 million to help get NAMII going, which will be matched by a consortium of big name corporations, universities and non-profits including Boeing, IBM, and Carnegie Mellon University, just to name a few. NASA (already a big fan of 3D printing), the National Science Foundation and other big time funders are also expected to kick in a few million shekels.

Process: LMC (Leftover Material from a Cup)

Material: Plastic

Purpose: To be honest, it doesn’t really have a purpose, but we know it looks cool and that it just had to be shared.

The blog's up! This weeks TERM TIME: Facet.