Month: July 2017

1000x faster Metal Printing

The challenge with all these claims is that there’s no standard measure for printing speed, making these hard to compare. The best seems to be kg / h.

The SPEE3D printer has the potential to turn 3D metal printing, which currently is just making prototypes of parts, into a tool for manufacturing actual parts for use. It is up to 1000x quicker than conventional 3D metal printers.

Copper Rocket Nozzle
Print Time: 199 minutes
Weight: 17.9KG
Cost: $716
Speed: 5.4 kg / h

This 265mm x 300mm high, aerospace rocket nozzle liner was printed in pure copper on the WarpSPEE3D. Parts like these are typically machined out of solid wrought copper, a process that takes weeks and costs 10s of 1000s of $. The lead time for producing these parts is also typically around 6 months.

2022-03-20: Seurat uses a pixelization type approach to speed things up.

With the equivalent of 2.4m pixels projected in each square, the machine can print parts with layers just 25 microns thick at a rate of 3kg an hour. This is 10X faster than a typical L-BPF machine at such a fine resolution. Production versions of the Seurat Large-Area Pulsed Laser Powder Bed Fusion printer are now being built, and future generations of the machine should end up being 100x faster.

Area printing will be competitive with mass-production factory processes, such as machining, stamping and casting. By 2030 it will be possible to produce silverware for $25 a kilo. “That means we could actually print silverware cheaper than you could stamp them out”.

2023-05-13: Seurat lands a big customer

The part Seurat will produce for Siemens Energy is a turbine sealing segment made from a nickel-based alloy — it’s a component the company hadn’t previously considered as a candidate for 3D printing.

Over the 6-year length of the contract, Seurat will produce 59 tons of the sealing segments and related components. The big benefit is the potential cost savings, but the approach also reduces the emissions associated with producing the part, because Seurat’s technology is powered with solar and wind electricity that the company sources locally. The equation Seurat uses to talk about this is 1 metric ton of emissions reductions for every ton of components made. The approach also dramatically reduces the feedstock needed for production, which cuts down on scrap.

Atul Gawande

We covered the marginal value of health care, the progress of AI in medicine, whether we should fear genetic engineering, whether the checklist method applies to marriage (maybe so!), whether FDA regulation is too tough, whether surgical procedures should be more tightly regulated, Michael Crichton and Stevie Wonder, wearables, what makes him weep, Knausgaard and Ferrante, why surgeons leave sponges in patients, how he has been so successful, his own performance as a medical patient, and much more.

Ice space station

An analysis by John Bucknell (x-Spacex senior engineer) describes an 11 meter diameter robotic vehicle with a 6000-megawatt nuclear thermal rocket in a NTTR arrangement. The rocket would be single stage to orbit and would be immediately be able to refly after landing and refueling much like todays airliners. Even fully reusable Spacex rockets where all stages are reused would need to be re-assembled.

He describes SSTOH missions to place a 21 meter minor and 214 meter major diameter toroidal habitat in space, capable of full terrestrial gravity simulation by spinning at 3 rpm. The habitat begins as 2 thin films defining the interior and exterior surfaces of the torus, which is then inflated with lunar-sourced water in a 1m thick shell and allowed to freeze.

Access to space is driven by the economics of launch vehicles. A previously published rocket propulsion cycle called the Nuclear Thermal Turbo Rocket (NTTR) is able to achieve payload fractions of more than 45% to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This rocket is intended to be completely reusable for the launch mission as it is a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) vehicle, which improves economics vastly. However, providing material to LEO is not always the most economical solution for permanent space-based habitation. In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) has been proposed as a method for avoiding the Earth’s gravity well for space-based construction with solutions proposed using Lunar, Martian as well as other resources.

Moon case

an initial lunar settlement is possible through further development of existing design work, but that a superior option is neither immediate nor obvious. Selecting a single framework (or a specific hybrid of several) is critical to best funnel capital into the most promising technologies. An action path is proposed that leverages consideration of permanence and significance as feedback to clearly characterize the best design choice for initial funding. Permanence seeks to answer, ‘How can we ensure that the construction of the first lunar base is able to expand into the foreseeable future in both population and space?,’ while significance seeks to answer, ‘How can we ensure that the consequences of operating the settlement are economically beneficial to society?’ There is not much literature to answer these questions, despite the importance of the answers.

Dust size cameras

The pill-sized cameras in today’s mobile phones may seem miraculously tiny, given that a decade ago the smallest cameras available for retail sale were the size of a pack of cards. Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology will make far smaller cameras. His team plan to replace them with truly minuscule devices that spurn every aspect of current photographic technology. Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.

Peak Avocado Toast

it was high time someone made fun of stupid avocado toast.

Several avocado-ripening cycles on, the subject has not dropped. Recently, the online lender SoFi (that’s for “social finance,” a phrase once used to denote virtuous endeavors such as impact investing) promised a month of complimentary toast to customers who bought a house. “Buy a home using a SoFi mortgage, and you’ll receive an email asking whether you want regular or gluten-free bread,” the company advised. “Avocados and bread will then arrive in a series of 3 shipments—though you’ll still need to toast the bread yourself to get the full experience.”