3-D printing shows great potential in laboratories for making customized labware and reaction vessels. In addition, affordable fused filament fabrication (FFF)-based 3-D printing has successfully produced high-quality and affordable scientific equipment, focusing on tools without strict chemical compatibility limitations. As the additives and colorants used in 3-D printing filaments are proprietary, their compatibility with common chemicals is unknown, which has prevented their widespread use...
Purpose – Isolated communities face a variety of inconveniences including severe remoteness, poor roads, extreme climate conditions, resulting in the lack of security of supply chains and exorbitant prices for cargo delivery. The paper investigates the present advantages and prospects of applying 3-D printing to improve economics and everyday life of remote communities, reindeer herder case taken as an example. Design/Methodology/Approach-This study covers the use of a low-cost open-source ...
Fused particle fabrication (FPF) (or fused granular fabrication (FGF)) has potential for increasing recycled polymers in 3-D printing. Here, the open source Gigabot X is used to develop a new method to optimize FPF/FGF for recycled materials. Virgin polylactic acid (PLA) pellets and prints were analyzed and were then compared to four recycled polymers including the two most popular printing materials (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)) as well as the two most common waste plastic...
Industrial Czochralski silicon (Cz-Si) photovoltaic (PV) efficiencies have routinely reached >20% with the passivated emitter rear cell (PERC) design. Nanostructuring silicon (black-Si) by dry-etching decreases surface reflectance, allows diamond saw wafering, enhances metal gettering, and may prevent power conversion efficiency degradation under light exposure. Black-Si allows a potential for >20% PERC cells using cheaper multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) materials, although dry-etching is wi...
3-D printing has potential to revolutionize manufacturing of customized low-cost scientific equipment, and numerous self-designed applications have already been realized and demonstrated. However, the applicability of 3-D printed devices to cleanrooms used for semiconductor processing is not as straightforward, as the controlled environment sets strict requirements for the allowed materials and items. This work investigates the opportunity to utilize 3-D printing in cleanrooms by analyzing th...
Abstract Social media is a form of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other contents (such as videos and audios). It is also a collection of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration; websites dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking and social...
Abstract Social media is a form of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other contents (such as videos and audios). It is also a collection of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration; websites dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking and social...
This paper seeks to contribute to recent food security debate. On the basis of field study conducted in three low income areas of Manzini, this study investigated how insufficient food has become a chronic development problem in Africa’s urban area due to rapid urbanization which is eating up the resourceful land and pushing food production further away. Therefore this study was designed to capture the role of migration, urbanization and its implications on food security among the selected ...
Three types of highly-customizable open source probe positioning systems are evaluated: (a) mostly 3-D printed, (b) partially printed using OpenBeam kinematic constraints, and (c) a 3-level stack of low-cost commercial single axis micropositioners and some printed parts. All systems use digital distributed manufacturing to enable bespoke features, which can be fabricated with RepRap-class 3-D printer and easily accessible components. They are all flexible in material choice for custom compone...
The Michigan furniture industry produces >150 tons/day of wood-based waste, which can be upcycled into a wood polymer composite (WPC). This study investigates the viability of using furniture waste as a feedstock for 3-D printer filament to produce furniture components. The process involves: grinding/milling board scraps made of both LDF/MDF/LDF and melamine/particleboard/paper impregnated with phenolic resins; pre-mixing wood-based powder with the biopolymer poly lactic acid (PLA), extruding...
The photovoltaic (PV) industry requires efficient cutting of large single and multi-crystalline (sc- and mc-) silicon (Si) wafers. Historically multi-wire slurry sawing (MWSS) dominated, but the higher productivity of diamond-wire-sawing (DWS) holds promise for decreasing PV costs in the future. While surface texturing of DWS wafers is more complicated than of MWSS wafers, especially in mc-Si wafers, nanotexturing has been shown to overcome this challenge. While the benefit of nanotexturing i...
Although distributed additive manufacturing can provide high returns on investment, the current markup on commercial filament over base polymers limits deployment. These cost barriers can be surmounted by eliminating the entire process of fusing filament by three-dimensional (3-D) printing products directly from polymer granules. Fused granular fabrication (FGF) (or fused particle fabrication (FPF)) is being held back in part by the accessibility of low-cost pelletizers and choppers. An open-...
RepRaps (self Replicating Rapid prototypers), which 3-D print objects using fused filament fabrication (FFF), have evolved rapidly since their open source introduction. These 3-D printers have primarily been limited to desktop sizes of volumes of ~8000 cm 3 , which has limited the attention of the scientific community to investigating deformation of common thermoplastics such as polylactic acid (PLA) used in FFF printing. The only existing physically relevant deformation model was expanded he...
This paper presents a novel design for the top contact of thin film photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. The new top contact is formed by fabricating a 20nm thin honeycomb shaped silver mesh on top of an ultra-thin 13nm of indium tin oxide. The new top contact offers the potential to reduce the series resistance of the cell while increasing the light current via plasmonic resonance. Using the nano-bead lithography technique the honeycomb top contact was fabricated and electrically characterized. Th...
Does a national research-focused organization need a technically competent leader? This study provides preliminary answers to that question using a natural experiment underway at the Department of Energy (DOE): a leader with significant high-level management experience superior to that of his predecessors, but no relevant technical experience was appointed to run the vast scientific research operation. The following hypothesis is proposed: A major risk of allowing technically-unqualified lead...