Full Article: http://disrupt3d.com/2013/04/24/3d-printing-hobbyists-hit-employment-jackpot/

Learn about the research and development of 3D printing technology, its potential uses, and design opportunities. This event will include demonstrations of 3D printing technology by the RapidTech National Center for Rapid Technologies funded by National Science Foundation (NSF).

Marc Madou, Chancellor’s Professor, The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California Irvine.

From: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/05/oxford-university-researchers-create-3d-printed-human-tissue-replacement/

See also: http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2013/130405.html

View full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/3doodler-3d-printing-pen_n_2725166.html

Speaking at MD&M West early yesterday morning, Dr. Madou, Chancellor’s Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, shared not only the details of CD microfluidics and its potential for IVD but also his passion for returning manufacturing to the United States again. Research and discovery “have lost their link to manufacturing here,” he said. There is no manufacturing at major universities; it is mainly outsourced, often abroad, he continued. As such, back-and-forth communication and continued collaboration between those who originate the technology and those who manufacture it is lost, to the detriment of all stakeholders.

Madou sees this phenomenon as the result, in part, of a culture that no longer values manufacturing as it once did. Our infatuation with all things digital and virtual is likely to blame for this perception, Madou suggested in a brief conversation with me after his talk. The field of mechanical engineering, for example, is not a particularly popular career choice for today’s digitally minded university students, even though it remains vitally important to technological innovation and its commercialization. Fortunately, Madou pointed out, there also exists a type of grassroots “maker movement” taking hold in major U.S. cities, primarily in the form of Maker Faires, which “celebrate invention, creativity and resourcefulness” by showcasing DIY projects and feats of science and engineering produced by hand by amateurs, even children. The fairs have been gaining in popularity since their debut in 2006 and seem to be successful in demonstrating how cool, exciting, and important making things (i.e., manufacturing) can be.

The things Madou and his students are making in Madou’s BioMEMS laboratory at UC Irvine include the aforementioned microfluidic CD system, which takes advantage of centrifugal forces for fluid propulsion. Fluidic channels and reservoirs are embedded in a CD-like plastic substrate, Madou explained at MD&M, and the whole platform is spun on a motor in order to manipulate fluids. A range of fluidic functions have been designed and implemented, including valving, decanting, calibration, mixing, metering, sample splitting, and separation. Those fluidic functions have been combined with analytical measurement techniques, such as optical imaging, absorbance, and fluorescence spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, to make the centrifugal platform a viable, inexpensive solution for medical and clinical diagnostics. Applications of a compact-disc-based centrifuge platform include an automated immunoassay platform, multiple parallel screening assays, and cellular-based assays.

Additional information on Dr. Madou’s microfluidics CD system is available on Qmed.

—Maureen Kingsley

From: http://www.ivdtechnology.com/blog/ivdt-insight/mdm-west-keynote-speaker-mark-madou-bring-manufacturing-back

Watch it here.

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A 3D printer creates the mold for a new bioengineered ear. Photo Credit: Lindsay France/Cornell University Photography

A new fabricated ear created in the Cornell laboratory. Photo Credit: Lindsay France/Cornell University Photography

Daniel A. Anderson / University Communications

Swati Sharma, a Ph.D. candidate in materials science & engineering who has trained at RapidTech, is working on nanoscale carbon wires (highly magnified in background) that could make faster, cheaper biomedical testing devices.

Ed Tackett whirls through the fourth floor of UC Irvine’s Engineering Hall, showing off tiny toy figurines, a bright-red leg bone, a waxen skull and more.

“We’re just finishing the housing for a ‘non-squish’ breast cancer detector,” he says, looking at freshly painted soft-pink components. Student intern Garritt Ong, 20, of Saddleback College looks on, hefting a block of resin to begin a project of his own. “I love it; I’m learning everything about everything,” he says enthusiastically.

All of the items on display and hundreds more have been designed on computers and produced via three-dimensional printing at the National Center for Rapid Technologies, or RapidTech, the only nonprofit in the U.S. dedicated to hands-on training of community college and university students in the next wave of advanced manufacturing.

Forget the Industrial Revolution and tool-and-die factory assembly lines. While custom 3-D printers are gaining popularity in home handyman projects, the printers here are industrial-strength, and so is the mission.

It’s a campus version of the supply chain of the future, academics and other experts say, and key to bringing full-fledged manufacturing back to this nation. President Obama is seeking $1 billion in next year’s federal budget to make the U.S. a world leader in advanced manufacturing.

“This is an extraordinarily exciting time, characterized by many as a third manufacturing revolution. Technologies like additive manufacturing are changing the rules,” says Mike Molnar, director of the new interagency Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office. “Just as computing evolved from mainframe data centers to personal devices, in the future, if you have an idea, you will be able to make it.”

UCI is already leading the way in biomedical and additive manufacturing, and in educating a future workforce. While the U.S. has pioneered these additive manufacturing techniques, European and Asian researchers and companies are catching on fast.

“China is not in a race to the bottom with us; they are in a race to the top. They have a very large number of high-tech factories, and they are incorporating the very latest advanced manufacturing technologies. So we need to remain one step ahead,” says Gregory Washington, dean of UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering.

“Having RapidTech on campus is a real plus. We hope to be one of the few universities capable of providing engineers with an understanding of their individual disciplines and, on top of that, who have an understanding of how things are made – literally from doing it themselves – so they can walk into companies and be commercially productive from Day One.”

Bringing real-world mechanical engineering shops back to universities and colleges is critical, says mechanical engineering professor Marc Madou, one of the first to sound the alarm on the need for more U.S. engineers capable of producing what they design. About 600,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are currently unfilled.

“After the digital revolution, mechanical engineering shops on campuses fell out of favor. They were considered dirty, lowbrow. Now those attitudes are changing,” says Madou, who teaches an advanced manufacturing class for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students.

In 2005, he co-authored Micromanufacturing, which looked at the future of manufacturing worldwide. All his students also take a practicum at RapidTech each year, to learn how to turn theories into prototypes and finished products.

Tackett, director of RapidTech, is blunt: “We have advanced engineering students come in who don’t know what a Phillips-head screwdriver is.”

The facility has more than 20 printers and other large pieces of equipment that help both academia and industry use modern technologies for engineering, biology and even arts projects. RapidTech has already produced everything from medical devices to architectural models to drum sets, as well as servicing such traditional sectors as aerospace and automotive.

Students from Saddleback College are employed as interns, and UCI doctoral students and researchers come knocking with project designs – as do Boeing, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Army and hundreds of smaller companies and academic laboratories.

“We’re so glad that RapidTech is here. It’s just essential to have that kind of fabrication facility at a major university,” says Bruce Tromberg, professor of biomedical engineering and director of UCI’s Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic. He and fellow researchers have spent more than 20 years working on a laser breast scanner that’s less painful than traditional mammography machines and may be far more effective with denser breast tissue.

Once they nailed down the advanced physics principles, they needed to figure out a way to craft a patient-friendly device containing their pioneering laser technology. Tromberg’s doctoral students modeled a handheld version out of Play-Doh and walked across campus to RapidTech with it, getting a testable prototype within days instead of months.

Swati Sharma and Giulia Canton, graduate students of Madou’s, have been laboring for months on nanoscale carbon wires for biomedical devices that could sense more cheaply and quickly than traditional tests how a drug is metabolizing or whether a disease is present in DNA. For them, Madou’s class and RapidTech are vital.

“They help me learn how to do things, not just study them,” Canton says.

— Janet Wilson, University Communications

For more info:

http://www.nist.gov/mep/america.cfm

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https://www.facebook.com/NISTMEP

This new machinery enables full-size sandstone buildings to be made without human intervention, using a stereolithography 3-D printing process that requires only sand and our special inorganic binder to operate. D-Shape is a new building technology which will revolutionize the way architectural design is planned, and building constructions are executed. By simply pressing the “enter” key on the keypad we intend to give the architect the possibility to make buildings directly, without intermediaries who can add interpretation and realization mistakes.

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