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May/Jun 2013  

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Materials

Top Features

Hot Off the Press: 3-D printers making more products—and news

Turn on the TV, pick up a consumer magazine or visit a popular Web news portal these days and you just might get an update on 3-D printing—the hottest topic in manufacturing.

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Electron beam melting serves up implants

When the rapid-prototyping industry launched in 1987, stereolithography apparatuses (SLAes) were used to build physical parts from pools of laser-cured liquid resin. Since then, the technology has grown, changed and inspired a handful of fundamentally different additive-manufacturing (AM) processes that also create parts by binding successive layers of various raw materials into CAD-designated shapes.

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Taking flex circuits to the extreme

Unlike traditional circuit boards, flexible circuits feature plastic substrates that allow them to bend during use. In certain medical procedures, for example, flex circuits are better able than their rigid counterparts to handle the bending and twisting involved in moving a tiny electronic device to its destination inside the body.

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Meeting the conductive challenge

You probably don’t think about electrically conductive inks as you drive to work each morning. But it’s likely that you give at least a passing thought to some of your vehicle’s features that incorporate potentiometers and rheostats made with conductive inks.

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Looking Beyond MEMS

The deep-reactive-ion-etching (DRIE) process—notable for producing steep trenches and high walls reminiscent of a miniature Manhattan streetscape—helped propel microelectromechanical systems into the mainstream in the 1990s.

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CFRP gets ‘tough’ love from microtools

Carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) is a corrosion-resistant and lightweight material used in everything from paintball guns to Formula One racecars. The composite material has an “ultimate tensile strength” approximately four times that of steel and unrivaled strength-to-weight ratio, meaning it’s not only stronger than alternative materials, like aluminum, but you also need far less of it by weight to do the same job.

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Top Videos

Standford researchers develop all-carbon solar cell

Stanford University researchers have developed an all-carbon, thin-film prototype solar cell that they say could reduce the manufacturing costs associated with rigid silicon solar panels.

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T-Ink animation showcases conductive ink technology

T-Ink Inc., New York, offers a "thinking ink" technology that reportedly can replace physical switches, wire and sensors with printed components that create circuits without wires, as the company illustrated in a recent video animation of the process used to make an automobile overhead light.

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Micromanufacturing lab tour at Northwestern Univ.

During the 7th International Conference on MicroManufacturing in March, conference co-chairs Jian Cao and Kornel Ehmann, along with a few of their students, provided an overview of their research and work stations at the university's micromanufacturing lab.

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Racecar sets world speed record

Small Car at Vienna thumbA 285µm-long racecar has been fabricated in record time via ultrahigh-precision 3-D printing at Vienna University of Technology.

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Australian researchers produce 'perfect' single-atom transistor

Feb. 20, 2012—The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, today announced that researchers at the university's ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology successfully created a working transistor the size of one atom.

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Top Products

Mass production with 3-D printer

MakerBot Industries LLC

Replicator thumbWith the stated aim of democratizing manufacturing, MakerBot Industries LLC, Brooklyn, N.Y., heralds its Replicator personal 3-D printer as just the machine for the job. And at less than $2,000, the printer certainly fits right in with the price range of personal computers.

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Micromolding co. serves medical, consumer electronics markets

Matrix Plastic Products

Matrix molding thumbMatrix Plastics Products, Wood Dale, Ill., micromolds plastic parts smaller than a pellet of resin with tolerances of 12.7µm or less for the consumer electronics industry, according to the company's Web site.

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Datron offers high-speed MC for plastic

Datron Dynamic Inc.’s recently introduced M8 PlasticMill is a high-speed CNC machining center designed specifically for plastic-machining applications that produce chips or dust that must be extracted and collected.

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Photostructurable material for fabbing microdevices

Life BioScience Inc.has developed a patent-pending, photostructurable glass-ceramic called APEX. The material is available for purchase and can be used by customers to fabricate 3-D glass and/or ceramic microdevices in high-volume batch processes.

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Fiber laser system optimized for micro-material processing

Together with six industrial partners, the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V.(LZH; Hannover, Germany) has developed a picosecond fiber laser system said to be well suited for micro-machining brass and aluminum materials.

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