TechFront New Developments in Manufacturing and Technology
Researchers to Combine Computing, Materials Science with Maker Movement
H
oping to capitalize on the current wave of interest in additive manufacturing and the maker movement, two professors from the University of Wisconsin- Madison (Madison, WI) and Drexel University (Philadelphia) are aiming to meld recent advances in computing, additive manufacturing and materials sciences into a new discipline dubbed the “informatics of making.”
Vadim Shapiro
With a new $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (Arlington, VA), professors Vadim Shapiro and William Regli are teaming up to try to devise a com- putational framework that would unite these fields and give manufacturers the building blocks for a rich set of computer tools that
would help account for material complexity in new products within a computer model. “We’re not just talking about computing systems, but spe- cifically computing systems in support of material activities,” said Shapiro, the Bernard and Frances M. Weideman profes- sor of mechanical engineering and computer sciences at UW-Madison. “Moving forward requires computational models that know about geometry, materials and physics.”
Research into the “informatics of making” could help 3D printing by creating new computational tools for melding additive manufacturing, materials science and the maker movement.
The research will aim to help solve problems encoun- tered when data is exchanged for use in 3D printing. When 3D printer users exchange data on an object they’re trying to print, Shapiro refers to that data as a “dumb” file that
“It’s almost at the point where you can interchangeably think of materials as bits of information.”
The collaboration calls for Shapiro to add his expertise in
geometry, mathematical models and computer models while Regli adds his experience with information systems, knowledge representation and archives. A professor of engineering and computer science at Drexel, Regli has worked in computer sci- ence and manufacturing. He contends that computational de- sign tools need to catch up to advances in materials science. “If I want to design an object that has variable material properties, on a 3D printer, the tools just don’t exist,” said Regli, associate dean of research at Drexel’s iSchool, College
transmits only an approximate shape of an object. Shapiro believes the next step is to create models and languages that also include information about the materials, physics and design intent. “It’s almost at the point where you can interchangeably think of materials as bits of information,” Shapiro says.
Finding the right abstractions with which to unite princi- ples of design, materials and computing will be the research- ers’ main challenge, according to Regli. “We have to figure out how to relate the representations for material and behavior
November 2013 |
ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 37
of Information Science & Technology. “What you’re making is more than a shape; it’s how the shape responds to its physical environment, how it acts under certain forces.”
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