Thursday, March 2 is PADT’s annual SciTech Festival Open House, from 5-8pm (click HERE to register). This year, three student groups working on a range of projects will be present to showcase their work, all of which involved some level of 3D printing. Please bring friends and families to meet and discuss ideas with these students from our community.
Formula SAE Team (Arizona State University)
ASU’s Formula SAE team will be onsite with their 2016 car, demonstrating specifically how they used 3D printing to manufacture the functional intake manifolds on these cars. What is specifically interesting is how they have modified their manifold design to improve performance while leveraging the advantages of 3D printing, and also they have evaluated multiple materials and processes over the recent years (FDM, SLS).
Prosthetic Arm Project (BASIS Chandler)
Rahul Jayaraman will be back to discuss how he and 30 students at BASIS Chandler manufactured, assembled and delivered about 20 prosthetic hands to an organization that distributes these to children in need across the world. Rahul and PADT were featured in the news for this event.
Cellular Structures in Nature (BASIS Chandler)
A BASIS Chandler High School senior, Amy Zhang, just started her Senior Research Project with PADT, focusing on a project at the intersection of biology and 3D printing, investigating cellular structures that occur on surfaces in nature, like the wing of a dragonfly or the shell on a turtle or the encasing of a pineapple – all of which are comprised of cellular geometries. Using 3D scanning, image analysis and mathematical methods, Amy hopes to develop models for describing these structures that can then be used in developing design principles for 3D printing. You can learn more on Amy’s blog: http://shellcells.blogspot.com/
