Browse Topic: Fabrication
This research demonstrates a facile method for fabricating an anti-icing coating through spray deposition on a metallic substrate. A dual-layer structure was designed to enhance icephobic properties: a primer layer incorporating fluorocarbon resin, butyl acetate, and rod-shaped micrometer-sized metal oxides to establish a secondary roughness morphology, followed by a topcoat composed of butyl acetate and nano-scaled superhydrophobic particles. Evaluation of the coating performance revealed a maximum water contact angle of 171.9°, indicating exceptional hydrophobicity. Furthermore, the coating exhibited notable abrasion resistance and anti-icing capabilities against overlaying ice.
This research investigates the fabrication and evaluation of Delrin (polyoxymethylene, POM) composites reinforcing 5-20 wt.% chopped ramie fiber (RF). The polymer composites were fabricated via the injection moulding technique. Glass transition temperature (Tg), thermal conductivity, Vicat softening temperature (VST), heat deflection temperature (HDT), melt flow index (MFI), and coefficient of linear thermal expansion (CLTE) were the various thermal characteristics of the sustainable composites that were systematically evaluated as per the ASTM standards. The addition of RF drastically altered the Delrin matrix's performance. Among the formulations, the composite with 15 wt.% RF had the best combination of properties: higher VST and HDT values, which provide greater dimensional stability at high temperatures; lower CLTE, resulting in less thermal expansion; comparatively better thermal conductivity; and improved heat dissipation. Eventually, there was a moderate drop in the MFI, indicating more rigid polymer chains that restrict the flowability of the composite, thereby increasing its heat-withstanding capabilities. DSC analysis revealed a slight upward shift in Tg and increased crystallinity, suggesting restricted polymer chain mobility and enhanced load transfer at 20 wt.% RF loadings, agglomeration effects, and weaker interfacial bonding with the matrix led to deterioration in properties. Aircraft cabin components like interior panels, ducting supports, and lightweight non-structural fittings requires dimensional stability, thermal resistance, and mechanical reliability under fluctuating flight conditions.
This organizational process survey provides insight into the technical aspects of approved airworthy aircraft modifications applied in government organization vertical lift flight test. The publication reviews processes applied by the National Research Council of Canada's Flight Research Laboratory (NRC-FRL) and its Airworthiness Control System to enable research flight testing. Dominated by the need for integrating experimental payloads, the NRC-FRL embeds a Design and Fabrication Service organization for modification of internal and external client projects and flight test aircraft. In context of experimental flight testing, this work reviews technical information on process, facilities, and methodology for airworthy integration of flight test payloads. Information is used to synthesize recommendations in experimental vertical lift flight testing that satisfy both formal (regulated compliance) and informal (compliance intent) airworthiness requirements.
Master Bond EP40 is a two-part, room temperature curing epoxy for bonding, sealing, coating, and encapsulating. EP40 bonds well to a variety of substrates, including naval steel, the primary structural metal used in the shipbuilding industry. Master Bond Inc., Hackensack, NJ To reduce its environmental impact and pollution, the shipping industry is investigating methods to construct more lightweight ships. One potential method is using adhesive bonding techniques to replace traditional welding and riveted joints on ships to fabricate lighter ships with smaller carbon footprints. However, adhesives age and deteriorate when exposed to moisture, high temperatures, and ultraviolet light. This makes it necessary to understand how they age in maritime environments to determine whether they can truly replace traditional welding techniques. To this end, researchers at Centro de Investigación en Tecnologías Navales e Industriales (CITENI) and Centro de Investigación TIC (CITIC) developed a new method for studying adhesive aging on naval steel substrates. Master Bond EP40 was selected as the test adhesive for this method due to its strong performance and suitability for marine conditions. By using EP40, the team ensured that the observed adhesive bonding behavior would reflect a high-quality epoxy's potential in ship structures. The goal was to evaluate how EP40 bonds to naval steel and how the bulk epoxy material would behave in seawater to provide insights into the construction of lighter ships using this approach.
Multimodal sensors, capable of simultaneously acquiring multiple physical or chemical signals, have shown broad application potential in fields such as health monitoring, soft robotics, and energy systems. However, current multimodal sensors often suffer from complex fabrication processes and signal decoupling challenges, which limit their practical deployment. To address these issues, this work presents a thin-film temperature–strain multimodal sensor (FTSMS) fabricated via laser processing. The temperature-sensing unit, based on the Seebeck effect, achieves a sensitivity of 9.08 μV/°C, while the strain-sensing unit, utilizing BaTiO₃/AlN@PDMS as the sensitive layer, exhibits a gauge factor (GF) of 43.2. By integrating distinct sensing mechanisms (thermovoltage for temperature and capacitance change for strain), the FTSMS enables self-decoupled measurements over 20–90 °C. Applied in LIB monitoring, it successfully captures real-time temperature and strain variations during charge-discharge cycles and provides multidimensional information throughout thermal runaway (TR) processes, enabling early TR warning and supporting safety-oriented battery design.
With plenty of references to national security and international competition, the University of Arkansas held the grand opening of MUSiC, the first multiuser silicon carbide (SiC) fabrication facility in the U.S. in mid-November. Helmed by Dr. H. Alan Mantooth, the founding director of the UA Power Group (UAPG), the new MUSiC facility will expand the UAPG's capabilities thanks in part to $20 million in funding from the National Science Foundation's Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 Program (Mid-scale RI-1), with additional support from the ARL's Army Research Office and X-FAB. Congressman Steve Womack (R) made it clear that, even when the federal government is pulling back funding for research efforts across the country, he still supports the work at MUSiC. “This facility is vital,” Womack said during MUSiC's opening ceremony. “Vital to our nation, vital to our national security, vital to our economic development, and we're in a fast-paced cavalry battle right now with near peers around the globe for research on these issues. It is essential we win that race.”
Missions to the moon and other planets will require large-scale infrastructure that would benefit from autonomous assembly by robots without on-site human intervention. Modular and reconfigurable structures, such as those built from lattice-based building blocks, are reusable and easy to manufacture. Furthermore, reconfigurable systems have the potential to outperform traditional, fixed infrastructure in applications that require high levels of flexibility in addition to structural strength and rigidity. NASA Ames Research Center has developed a novel and efficient mobile bipedal robot system to construct low-mass, high precision, and largescale infrastructure.
NASA has developed a novel approach for macroscale biomaterial production by combining synthetic biology with 3D printing. Cells are biologically engineered to deposit desired materials, such as proteins or metals, derived from locally available resources. The bioengineered cells build different materials in a specified 3D pattern to produce novel microstructures with precise molecular composition, thickness, print pattern, and shape. Scaffolds and reagents can be used for further control over material product. This innovation provides modern design and fabrication techniques for custom-designed organic or organic-inorganic composite biomaterials produced from limited resources.
In the electrical machines, detrimental effects resulted often due to the overheating, such as insulation material degradation, demagnetization of the magnet and increased Joule losses which result in decreased lifetime, and reduced efficiency of the motor. Hence, by effective cooling methods, it is vital to optimize the reliability and performance of the electric motors and to reduce the maintenance and operating costs. This study brings the analysis capability of CFD for the air-cooling of an Electric-Motor (E-Motor) powering on Deere Equipment's. With the aggressive focus on electrification in agriculture domain and based on industry needs of tackling rising global warming, there is an increasing need of CFD modeling to perform virtual simulations of the E-Motors to determine the viability of the designs and their performance capabilities. The thermal predictions are extremely vital as they have tremendous impact on the design, spacing and sizes of these motors.
Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center have developed additively manufactured thermal protection system (AMTPS) comprised of two printable heat shield material formulations. These formulations are directly applied by 3D printer or other robotic extrusion system and bonded to a spacecraft to devise a heat shield suitable for atmospheric entry. This technology could significantly decrease heat shield or thermal protection system (TPS) fabrication cost and time.
The assessment of collision risks is crucial for effective risk control and scientific management of maritime safety. To prevent maritime transportation accidents, an accident causation model has been proposed to analyze risks in maritime transportation systems. The 24-model further analyzes the impact pathways of accident factors in the accident chain and calculates the fit of HOF-related factors. Using Bayesian Networks as a foundation and the 24-model as a tool, a Bayesian Network model for collision risk is constructed by identifying risk factors and determining their correlations, utilizing accident data from Chinese maritime authorities. Utilizing a Bayesian Network to construct a ship collision risk model that couples HOF and calculates conditional probabilities of relevant node occurrences. To explore the coupled relationships between nodes in a network, this study employs the N-K model to construct a safety risk coupling model for ship collision accidents, calculating risk values for different coupling types within the model. Case analysis shows that accidents result from dynamic interaction and linear combination of risk factors. The analysis of experimental results indicates that various accident factors contribute differently to overall maritime risk. Human factors are the direct cause of maritime ship collision accidents. From the perspective of coupled risk, organizational factors, as root influences, are crucial aspects that bridge resource management needs to focus on. The application of this model provides maritime personnel with a novel approach to mitigate the risk of maritime collisions.
Researchers blend theoretical insight and precision experiments to entangle photons on an ultra-thin chip. Harvard University, Allston, MA In the race toward practical quantum computers and networks, photons - fundamental particles of light - hold intriguing possibilities as fast carriers of information at room temperature. Photons are typically controlled and coaxed into quantum states via waveguides on extended microchips, or through bulky devices built from lenses, mirrors, and beam splitters. The photons become entangled - enabling them to encode and process quantum information in parallel - through complex networks of these optical components. But such systems are notoriously difficult to scale up due to the large numbers and imperfections of parts required to do any meaningful computation or networking. Could all those optical components could be collapsed into a single, flat, ultra-thin array of subwavelength elements that control light in the exact same way, but with far fewer fabricated parts?
A research team led by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a new fabrication technique that could improve noise robustness in superconducting qubits, a key technology for enabling large-scale quantum computers.
Through the Artemis campaign, NASA will send astronauts on missions to and around the Moon. The agency and its international partners report progress continues on Gateway, the first space station that will permanently orbit the Moon, after visiting the Thales Alenia Space facility in Turin, Italy, where initial fabrication for one of two Gateway habitation modules is nearing completion.
The scope of this SAE Aerospace Recommended Practice (ARP) is to establish the procedure for creating titles of aerospace tubing and clamp installation documents generated by SAE Subcommittee G-3E.
Aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs) have attracted extensive attention due to their high safety, abundant reserves, and environmental friendliness. Iodine with high abundance in seawater (55 μg L-1) is highly promising for fabricating zinc-iodine batteries due to its high theoretical capacity (211 mAh g-1) and appropriate redox potential (0.54V). However, the low electrical conductivity of iodine hinders the redox conversion for an efficient energy storage process with zinc. Additionally, the formed soluble polyiodides are prone to migrate to the Zn anode, leading to capacity degradation and Zn corrosion.
MEMS is a more complex technology than traditional semiconductors. They are 3D structures with moving parts, making them much more difficult to fabricate. If you’re designing a semiconductor, you may be able to take advantage of an existing process development kit (PDK), which your foundry can provide to you. There is no equivalent approach in MEMS. It’s a “one process, one product” paradigm that requires a high level of customization. That takes time, money, and resources.
The mass production of conventional silicon chips relies on a successful business model with large “semiconductor fabrication plants” or “foundries.” New research by KU Leuven and imec shows that this “foundry” model can also be applied to the field of flexible, thin-film electronics. Adopting this approach would give innovation in the field a huge boost.
3D-printed microscopic particles, so small that to the naked eye they look like dust, have applications in drug and vaccine delivery, microelectronics, microfluidics, and abrasives for intricate manufacturing. However, the need for precise coordination between light delivery, stage movement, and resin properties makes scalable fabrication of such custom microscale particles challenging. Now, researchers at Stanford University have introduced a more efficient processing technique that can print up to 1 million highly detailed and customizable microscale particles a day.
Purdue University material engineers have created a patent-pending process to develop ultrahigh-strength aluminum alloys that are suitable for additive manufacturing because of their plastic deformability.
Additive Manufacturing (AM), particularly Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), has emerged as a revolutionary method for fabricating complex geometries using a variety of materials. Polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) is a thermoplastic material that is biodegradable and environmentally friendly, making it a preferred choice in additive manufacturing (AM) due to its affordability and ease of use. This study aims to optimize the FDM settings for PETG material and investigate the impact of key process parameters on printing performance. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the influence of crucial factors in FDM, including layer thickness, infill density, printing speed, and nozzle temperature, on significant outcomes such as dimensional accuracy, surface quality, and mechanical properties. The use of the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) approach enabled a systematic assessment of multi-performance characteristics, facilitating the optimization of the FDM process. The findings demonstrated that the GRA approach is an effective tool for determining optimal parameter settings to enhance printing productivity and ensure the production of high-quality components. This study provides deeper insights into the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) process for Polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) material, offering valuable strategies for improving manufacturing processes. By leveraging the GRA approach, this work highlights a reliable method for enhancing printing efficiency and quality, thereby promoting the wider adoption of FDM technology across various industries such as prototyping, manufacturing, and healthcare.
A novel sintering method of bridging the two mechanically polished and oriented single-crystals together face-to-face in a non- environmental controlled atmosphere to fabricate the bicrystal substrate of NaCl of macroscopic thickness, with a common zone axis and having planarity over large areas, has been developed. Epitaxial [001] bicrystalline thin face-centered cubic (fcc) metal film of surface-reactive metal-containing tilt grain boundary across the interface is first grown in high vacuum directly by flash deposition on initially fabricated [001] oriented bicrystalline substrate of NaCl. The [001] tilt boundary, thus produced, and is examined by electron microscopy to characterize grain boundary morphology and structure. The findings of some preliminary investigations are then presented. A distinct atomic structure is observed for 310 and 210 inclination. Both HAADF-STEM and Diffraction images reveal that such fabricated high-angle grain boundary accommodates minor deviations from the exact high coincidence density ∑=5 misorientation. The potential use of the present technique is extended to produce a wide variety of homophase bicrystals, containing grain boundaries at the midplane, normal to any crystallographic surface without the necessity of a separate bonding operation.
Nowadays, there are many technologies emerging like firefighting robots, quadcopters, and drones which are capable of operating in hazardous disaster scenarios. In recent years, fire emergencies have become an increasingly serious problem, leading to hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, and the destruction of property worth millions of dollars. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), India recorded approximately 1,218 fire incidents resulting in 1,694 deaths in 2020 alone. Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that fires account for around 265,000 deaths each year, with the majority occurring in low- and middle-income countries. The existing fire-extinguishing systems are often inefficient and lack proper testing, causing significant delays in firefighting efforts. These delays become even more critical in situations involving high-rise buildings or bushfires, where reaching the affected areas is particularly challenging. The leading causes of fires include electrical faults, open flames, and negligence, with a notable percentage stemming from cooking-related incidents. This research introduces a prototype of a quadcopter designed to extinguish fires, which is equipped with a mechanism for releasing balls. The prototype utilizes experimental items to mimic fire-suppressing balls, establishing a basis for potential applications in firefighting technology.
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