Lifeboat Foundation

More durable prosthetics and medical devices for patients and stronger parts for airplanes and automobiles are just some of the products that could be created through a new 3D printing technology invented by a UMass Lowell researcher.

Substances such as plastics, metals and wax are used in 3D printers to make products and parts for larger items, as the practice has disrupted the prototyping and manufacturing fields. Products created through the 3D printing of plastics include everything from toys to drones. While the global market for 3D plastics printers is estimated at $4 billion and growing, challenges remain in ensuring the printers create objects that are produced quickly, retain their strength and accurately reflect the shape desired, according to UMass Lowell’s David Kazmer, a plastics engineering professor who led the research project.

Called injection printing, the technology Kazmer pioneered is featured in the academic journal Additive Manufacturing posted online last week.

Robot that 3D prints and cooks plant-based meat alternatives for foodservice — can replace manufacturing practices.

Israeli start-up SavorEat has developed an automated, closed system that 3D prints and cooks plant-based meat alternatives for foodservice. “This robot can replace manufacturing practices,” CEO Racheli Vizman tells FoodNavigator.

It’s happening…

MOSCOW — KFC has partnered with a Russian bioprinting company to bring 3D printed chicken nuggets to the table.

Coined as the “meat of the future,” the lab-created chicken meat is KFC’s response to the growing interest of healthy lifestyles, the rise in demand for meat alternatives and the increasing need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production.

Continue reading “‘Meat of the future’: KFC to ‘3D bioprint’ meat using ‘animal flesh cells’” »

Interesting.

No word on whether they’ve tried to print chicken nuggets in space, though.

Can they print one for me next?

“The partners are working together to develop the world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets. The 3D printed nuggets are expected to be similar in taste and appearance to KFC’s original product, but will have the benefit of being more environmentally friendly to produce.”

When I think of KFC and its largely unchanging menu of fried chicken, I do not immediately think of innovation. However a new collaboration forged between the fast-food company and Russia-based bioprinting firm 3D Bioprinting Solutions might just change my mind. The partners are working together to develop the world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets. The 3D printed nuggets are expected to be similar in taste and appearance to KFC’s original product, but will have the benefit of being more environmentally friendly to produce.

The bioprinted chicken nugget project is already underway, and the unlikely partners plan to have a final product ready for testing by this fall. The effort is part of KFC’s mission to create a “restaurant of the future” which leverages state-of-the-art technologies like 3D bioprinting to overcome solutions in the food industry today: such as finding more eco-friendly alternatives to traditional meat.

Continue reading “Printer lickin‘ good: KFC is bioprinting chicken nuggets” »

Circa 2019

The European Space Agency (ESA) study is investigating how practical constructing a manned base on the moon only using 3D printing technology could be, given that it would rely primarily on lunar dirt for building materials.

“Terrestrial 3D printing technology has produced entire structures,” Laurent Pambaguian, who heads the project for ESA, said in a statement. “Our industrial team investigated if it could similarly be employed to build a lunar habitat.”

AI SpaceFactory, a space architecture and technology design agency, recently won first prize in NASA’s competition to build a prototype Mars habitat.

Tiny, 3D printed cubes of plastic, with intricate fractal voids built into them, have proven to be effective at dissipating shockwaves, potentially leading to new types of lightweight armor and structural materials effective against explosions and impacts.

“The goal of the work is to manipulate the wave interactions resulting from a shockwave,” said Dana Dattelbaum, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on a paper to appear in the journal AIP Advances. “The guiding principles for how to do so have not been well defined, certainly less so compared to mechanical deformation of additively manufactured materials. We’re defining those principles, due to advanced, mesoscale manufacturing and design.”

Shockwave dispersing materials that take advantage of voids have been developed in the past, but they typically involved random distributions discovered through trial and error. Others have used layers to reverberate shock and release waves. Precisely controlling the location of holes in a material allows the researchers to design, model and test structures that perform as designed, in a reproducible way.