Lifeboat Foundation

3D printing has revolutionized the fields of healthcare, biomedical engineering, manufacturing and art design.

(3D-printed heart scaffold)

As the head of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s innovative Cancer Center, Bhargava has been plugging away at injecting more advanced engineering solutions into medical problems. The freeform 3D printer is one of the first futuristic achievements of that effort.

But Bhargava’s project is just one of a wave of technologies that stand to transform medicine and healthcare as we know it; to make them faster, more accurate, and hopefully, drastically more affordable. Microneedle patches, handheld diagnostic machines, and better sensing capabilities, as well as 3D bioprinting, are just a few of the technologies coming to a doctor’s office near you—or maybe even into your home—in the next decade.

Continue reading “5 Amazing Projects That Will Change the Future of Healthcare” »

Korean researchers have been experimenting further in the bioprinting of tracheal implants, publishing recent results in ‘Trachea with Autologous Epithelial Cells and Chondrocytes.’ The team of scientists details their use of polycaprolactone and hydrogel mixed with nasal epithelial and auricular cartilage cells.

After bioprinting an artificial trachea with these materials and tissue, they transplanted them into 15 rabbits, six of which were a control group. The goal was to find a way to overcome tracheal problems due to tumors, the most common of which are adenoid cystic carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas. Previously there have been substantial challenges in creating viable tracheas that are anatomically correct and can produce a ciliated epithelium. Issues have arisen with infection, implants that become dislodged, have migrated, or experienced obstruction.

This 3D-printed concept wheel by tyre manufacturer Goodyear uses living moss to absorb moisture from the road, before converting it into oxygen through photosynthesis.

The Oxygene tyre was revealed at this year’s Geneva Motor Show that officially kicked off yesterday, 8 March 2018.

The concept is a response to research conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that revealed more than 80 per cent of people who live in urban areas are exposed to air quality levels deemed to be unsafe.

Continue reading “Goodyear’s ‘living’ car tyre converts carbon dioxide into oxygen” »

Space architecture startup AI SpaceFactory achieved second place in the latest phase of a NASA-led competition, pitting several groups against each other in pursuit of designing a 3D-printed Mars habitat and physically demonstrating some of the technologies needed to build them.

With a focus on ease of scalable 3D-printing and inhabitants’ quality of life, as well as the use of modular imported goods like windows and airlocks, MARSHA lends itself impeccably well to SpaceX’s goal of developing a sustainable human presence on Mars as quickly, safely, and affordably as possible with the support of its Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle.

Continue reading “3D-printed Mars habitat could be a perfect fit for early SpaceX Starship colonies” »

Researchers are using 3D printing to develop electrodes with the highest electric charge store per unit of surface area ever reported for a supercapacitor.

A research collaboration from the University of California Santa Cruz and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have 3D printed a graphene aerogel that enabled them to develop a porous three-dimensional scaffold loaded with manganese oxide that yields better supercapacitor electrodes. The recently published their findings in Joule. Yat Li, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz, explained the breakthrough in an interview with R&D Magazine.

“So what we’re trying to address in this paper is really the loading of the materials and the amount of energy we can store,” Li said. “What we are trying to do is use a printing method to print where we can control the thickness and volume.

Continue reading “3D Printed Graphene Aerogel Enhances Supercapacitor Ability” »

After what has seemed a bit of a lapse in the timeline of their development, graphene-enabled supercapacitors may be poised to make a significant advance. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) have developed an electrode for supercapacitors made from a graphene-based aerogel. The new supercapacitor component has the highest areal capacitance (electric charge stored per unit of surface area) ever reported for a supercapacitor.

The 3D-printing technique they leveraged to make the graphene electrode may have finally addressed the trade-offs between the gravimetric (weight), areal (surface area), and volumetric (total volume) capacitance of supercapacitor electrodes that were previously thought to be unavoidable.

In previous uses of pure graphene aerogel electrodes with high surface area, volumetric capacitance always suffered. This issue has typically been exacerbated with 3D-printed graphene aerogel electrodes; volumetric capacitance was reduced even further because of the periodic large pores between the printed filaments.

Continue reading “3D Printed Graphene Aerogel Offers Highest-Ever Capacitance for a Supercapacitor” »

Too many people believe that art and science exist as polar opposites and have delineated the disciplines as existing in an irreconcilable dichotomy that acts to drive the two types of knowledge apart. This conceptualization of the knowledge cultures is akin to placing two magnets next to each other such that their same poles when aligned repel each other: it foolishly denies the absolute attraction that exists when you simply flip one magnet the other way. Centuries ago, this attraction between art and science was understood as a given. The most easily identifiable product of this was a person such as Leonard da Vinci, whose work didn’t move back and forth between science and art, but rather understood the two as inextricably interwoven.

In the world of 3D printing, there appears to be developing an understanding that the bubbles of art and science are actually simply contorted ways of viewing a larger field of human knowledge. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen likes to play in the field and apply her understanding to the creation of fashion collections. Her pieces are explorations that encourage collaborative efforts because of the breadth of expertise in a wide variety of fields needed to create the pieces she has in mind. For a 2013 collection, she worked with photographer Nick Knight, who had captured images of the way water moved when splashed upon the nude body, in order to turn those images into garments. It became clear to Knight that van Herpen understood the inseparable nature of art and science, as he explained in an interview with the New York Times:

Continue reading “3D Printed Dress from Iris van Herpen Pushes Boundaries of Fashion” »

In contrast, 3D-printed clothes can simply be dumped into blenderlike machines that turn the plastics into powder that can then be used to print out something new. And since 3D printing easily allows for custom sizing, the process is inherently frugal with materials.

But there are plenty of challenges that must be overcome before 3D-printed apparel goes mainstream.

One is cost. Even the smallest home 3D printers run several hundred dollars. A printer capable of printing human-sized apparel is beyond the reach of individual consumers. And it takes far longer to print an article of clothing than to produce a similar article via weaving or knitting. Peleg’s jacket, for example, takes about 100 hours to print.

Continue reading “Soon you may be able to 3D print clothing in your own home” »