More than 500,000 people paid $24 each to jostle with each other for unbelievable views of anatomical bodies and parts at a show called BodyWorlds2 at the Boston Museum of Science. Human cadavers were displayed in various poses with sinews, bones and organs all fully shown. The figures, called Plastinates, have been on tour in the USA for two years at science centers in Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Denver, Boston, St. Paul and Houston. I only saw about 60% of the exhibit in Boston—I didn’t have the patience or the stamina to wait in all the lines, or fend off all the elbows.
Not surprisingly, there is a fabulous materials story behind the plastinates. A German anatomist named Gunther von Hagens invented a technology to preserve specimens for medical observation using solvents and reactive polymers. The process goes like this: 1) Body parts (sometimes an entire body) are placed in a bath of ice-cold acetone. The solvent replaces body fluids in a process called freeze substitution, 2) The specimen is dehydrated, 3) The part goes into another solvent bath for defatting 4) The part then placed into a polymer solution, which is brought to a boil in a vacuum. Solvent is continuously extracted from the specimen. As the solvent leaves the specimen, polymer is drawn into the tissue as a replacement. 5) After the “forced impregnation� is completed, the specimen is cured with light, gas or heat, depending on the type of polymer.
Picking the right polymer is one of tricks of the process. The polymers must be reactive, have low viscosity, resist yellowing, and must be compatible with human tissue. Commonly used are silicones, epoxies, and polyester copolymers. Many auxiliary materials are also listed for sale at http://www.biodur.de/.
It should also come as no surprise that there are plenty of ethical issues surrounding these exhibits. Where did all of the bodies and parts come from? An investigation by National Public Radio was less than satisfied with claims that all specimens came from people who donated them for that purpose. A competing exhibition uses body parts from unclaimed Chinese. There was significant opposition to the exhibition when it first opened in Germany because of laws requiring the burial of all corpses.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
The airframe of Airbus's A350 XWB consists of a bigger proportion of carbon-fiber-reinforced composite structures than any other commercial jet to date: over 53 percent by weight.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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