Applications

Engineering meets zoology in a novel collaboration between the Zoo and GE Additive

Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden is home to 2,000 animals, including world-famous hippo Fiona, and is committed to providing each one with excellent care. Thanks to a novel partnership with GE Additive, known for pushing the boundaries of industrial 3D printing (often referred to additive manufacturing), some of the animals are getting meals from a fabricated feeder that encourages natural foraging behaviors.

With 852 exhibitors and 34,532 visitors, an increase of more than 8,000 visitors compared to the previous year, Formnext has become the leading trade fair for everything to do with additive manufacturing. The Frankfurt exhibition halls were packed from morning to night, with many visitors finding more than just inspiration for future projects and lively discussions, especially about materials. From Sabine Slaughter

New low-cost nasopharyngeal swabs can be manufactured quickly to address the international shortage of swabs for testing and research

By Lindsay Brownell

Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, in collaboration with healthcare, research, and industrial partners, have designed a new, fully injection-molded nasopharyngeal swab that can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively at high volume to help address the nationwide and international shortage of swabs for COVID-19 testing and research. The swabs are moving into human trials at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York and Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope in Arizona, which should be completed by the end of next week, and are in preclinical evaluation at six additional hospitals. Data from the two trials will be used to inform larger trials with COVID-19 patients, and California-based medical device manufacturer IPB, Inc. has been working around the clock to ramp up production of the new swabs to reach 200,000 per day by May 15.
Wyss-designed swabs enter human trials for COVID-19

Formlabs has fielded hundreds of requests, evaluated dozens of potential applications for 3D printed products, and is now supporting a handful of projects with high-impact potential. The current priority areas were selected based on clinical demand, technical feasibility, and regulatory implications. Priority areas for focus include test kit swabs, ventilator splitters, and face shields. Once designs have been tested and validated by the medical community, Formlabs has the resources available to scale production to tens of thousands of parts per week. We are ready to engage our internal resources and community of skilled volunteers to produce parts for healthcare providers all over the world.

You are never too old for model building, not even at VMR. Therefore we were looking forward to the challenge to produce a model for the company Breyer from Singen. They needed a 1:10 scale model of a special machine for a trade fair. After preparing the data, all individual components were produced in our 3D printer. For an exhibition model with high demands on the surface, however, there is still no suitable additive process. For this reason, the individual parts were then ground by hand. Then the model was painted and assembled - just like in real model making.

Für Modellbau ist man nie zu alt, auch nicht bei VMR. Daher haben wir uns auf die Herausforderung gefreut ein Messemodell für die Firma Breyer aus Singen anfertigen zu dürfen. Diese benötigten für eine Messe eine Sondermaschine im Maßstab 1:10 als Modell. Nach Aufbereitung der Daten wurden alle Einzelbauteile bei uns im 3D-Drucker hergestellt. Für ein Messemodell mit hohen Ansprüchen an die Oberfläche gibt es jedoch noch kein geeignetes additives Verfahren. Aus diesem Grund wurden die Einzelteile anschließend per Hand geschliffen. Danach wurde das Modell lackiert und zusammengesetzt - wie im richtigen Modellbau eben.

A New Program to Speed Development and Production of 3D Printed Foam Applications

With the unique sandblasting system by Norblast, Weerg raises the bar of 3D quality, smoother at touch and sight

You can fashion almost anything on a 3D printer these days, from the most intricate airplane parts to near-perfect replicas of the human skull. But back in 2007, few had printed an object that could be implanted into someone else’s body.

Ripples today introduces a new set of big-data analytics to its platform creating a new category for food and beverage marketers, called Beverage-Top Media.