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Dr. Robert MacCurdy is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Matter Assembly Computation Lab (MACLab). He is developing new algorithms, materials, and fabrication tools to automatically design and manufacture electromechanical systems, focusing on robotics.
Dr. MacCurdy did his PhD work with Hod Lipson at Cornell University and his postdoctoral work at MIT with Daniela Rus. He holds a BA in physics from Ithaca College, a BS in electrical engineering from Cornell University, and an MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from Cornell University.
While 3D printing technology may seem like a recent development, its origins can actually be traced back to the 1980s when Chuck Hull invented stereolithography (SLA). This process involved using UV light to solidify liquid plastic layer by layer, creating a three-dimensional object. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that 3D printing became more widely accessible and affordable due to advancements in materials and printing techniques.
“In the early days, it was single material, and the materials that you could fabricate with were not engineering materials,” explains Dr. MacCurdy. “We could use the method to make models representative of objects that we would then fabricate via other means. It was often referred to as rapid prototyping because it was a way of making models very quickly.”
However, despite its usefulness, early 3D printing technology encountered several limitations that hindered its broader application. The materials available during this initial phase were predominantly non-durable and lacked the mechanical properties necessary for creating functional, end-use parts. This restricted the technology primarily to prototyping, limiting its application in manufacturing.
Additionally, the resolution of early 3D printers was often insufficient for producing finely detailed objects, making them unsuitable for applications needing precision and complex geometries. The printers were costly and required significant technical expertise to operate, limiting their accessibility to larger companies with the necessary budgets and skilled personnel. As a result, while early 3D printing offered exciting possibilities, its impact was constrained by these technological and material limitations.
Since then, significant developments in 3D printing technology have occurred, including new methods such as selective laser sintering (SLS), fused deposition modeling (FDM), and digital light processing (DLP). These techniques allow for the use of various materials, including metals, plastics, and even food items. “The major revolution and evolution of 3D printing in the last 10 to 15 years has been the discovery of new materials suitable for end-use applications. Now you can directly fabricate the object, which will then be used rather than fabricating a non-functional prototype,” explains Dr. MacCurdy.
3D printing has transcended its initial use as a prototyping tool, evolving into a versatile technology with various applications across various industries. Today, it creates consumer products, medical devices, architectural models, automotive parts, and even aerospace components. “Now, we are printing functional end products. Whether that functional end product is a piece of synthetic meat, an occupiable structure from concrete, or robot components,” says Dr. MacCurdy.
Here are some of the current applications for 3D printing.
Traditionally, most 3D printing applications have relied on single-material usage, often limiting the functionality and durability of the printed items. This conventional approach was primarily due to the technological constraints of early 3D printers, which could not handle the complexity of simultaneously processing multiple materials. However, a significant shift towards multi-material 3D printing is on the horizon. The development of multi-material capabilities is expected to revolutionize the industry, creating intricate structures that integrate diverse materials within a single print.
“It’s one thing to make a 3D printed bracket that’s all the same material and has a lot of intelligence in the design. It’s another thing entirely to make, an entire aircraft seat with one manufacturing process that would potentially involve many dissimilar materials,” posits MacCurdy. “I’m not forecasting that we will be making entire seats, ever. It could be that there are lots of good reasons not to do that, but in the quest to make higher-performing objects cheaper, multimaterial integration will be inevitable.”
The quest to develop multi-material manufacturing processes also involves discovering how to use new materials in 3D printing. “The range of materials available via additive manufacturing has expanded in the last 15 years,” notes Dr. MacCurdy. “We’ve expanded the range into powder versions of engineering thermoplastics and metals. That allows for fabrication via laser melting or laser sintering to create end products that are mostly bulk plastic or almost fully solid metal. The final product is either a titanium alloy, steel alloy, or similar that has all the properties of metal rather than plastic so that you can use them for higher temperature or force applications.”
With new materials and processes, new tools and software are needed to manage them. “We need design tools that allow us to leverage multi-material fabrication capabilities,” notes D. MacCurdy. “My lab is designing tools. These new software developments will allow designers to specify what material goes where in a multi-material design and use multi-material 3D printing tools to fabricate that design.” While these new tools are still in development, they show much promise.
He continues, “We’ve been making our software tools as flexible as possible to be relatively agnostic of 3D printing modality. So, our latest design tool can leverage multi-material inkjet and multi-material extrusion. Multi-material 3D vat-photopolymerization is still a research curiosity that’s coming, along with multi-material powder bed fusion.”
Current design tools for 3D printing think within predefined boundaries, focusing primarily on an object’s exterior or surface shape rather than considering the internal structure’s potential. “Our traditional design tools model an object by describing its surface. If you have a cube, you think about the six faces of the cube. And that’s called a boundary representation. Virtually all of our CAD tools use boundary surface representations. Those boundary representations do not describe what is inside the boundary. They just described the boundary,” explains Dr. MacCurdy.
“That was fine when we were making everything from machining materials because everything inside would be the same material as the outside. With multi-material added manufacturing, we can fabricate precise interior microstructures with wildly dissimilar materials, but we don’t have a good way of describing those designs, so my software tools are designed to do just that.”
With a keen understanding of the challenges and opportunities in higher education, Kimmy Gustafson regularly contributes insightful articles to OnlineEngineeringPrograms.com, providing readers with a comprehensive view on the evolving landscape of engineering education since 2019. She has interviewed many engineering experts on a range of subjects, including geoengineering.
Kimmy has been a freelance writer for more than a decade, writing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics such as startups, nonprofits, healthcare, kiteboarding, the outdoors, and higher education. She is passionate about seeing the world and has traveled to over 27 countries. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. When not working, she can be found outdoors, parenting, kiteboarding, or cooking.
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