3D movies are hot. First Avatar. And then Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. The format is even coming to television.
Now comes the announcement that the special glasses required to watch 3D will be offered in biobased plastic resins. Cereplast, Inc. designer and manufacturer of proprietary bioplastics, and Oculus3D, a company focused on film-based 3D projection technology, announced that Oculus3D will introduce the world’s first biodegradable/compostable 3D glasses for movie theaters
Major 3D movie releases will require more than 10 million pairs of glasses to be shipped to movie theaters across the globe for each movie. While many theaters collect 3D glasses at the conclusion of each show, damaged glasses, or pairs not returned end up in trashcans and ultimately in landfill sites.
The CO2 emissions for the more than 10 million plastic glasses made from hydrocarbons is equivalent to the harmful emissions generated by burning 50,000 gallons of gasoline or 917 barrels of oil. The Oculus3D eyewear will feature Cereplast’s Compostables® resin made with Ingeo® polylactic acid (PLA) made from corn. These resins allow for the manufacturing of glasses made of renewable material and create a truly compostable product. According to Cereplast, the 3D glasses will return to nature in less than 180 days with no chemical residues or toxicity left in the soil if discarded at a compost site.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
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.
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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