5 Coolest Engineering Stories This Week
This week, join us as we try on a pair of liquid 3D printed Reeboks. We see Iceland drill down 5km to find the next big thing in volcanic energy. Touch objects that are not there and 3D print organs that know how they feel. See a new innovation in soft robotics that‘s controlled by light. These are the coolest engineering stories of the week.
Reebok’s New Liquid Factory
Reebok launched a sneaker this week with the help of 3D printing, not one to be left behind after the 3D printed shoe releases of Adidas, Nike, and Under Armour. Taking a completely new approach, Reebok used a custom liquid material 3D printing method to produce a portion of the sole for the Reebok Liquid Speed sneakers.
The new 3D printing process utilizes a urethane-based liquid developed by chemical giant BASF which built the soles without the use of any molds. Former NASA engineer and Reebok’s Head of Future Bill McInnis outlined:
“we are able to program robots to create the entire shoe outsole, without molds, by drawing in layers with a high-energy liquid material to create the first ever energy-return outsole, which performs dramatically better than a typical rubber outsole”
Molten Magma could power the future
Iceland is drilling 5km down into the ground to tap energy from magma oozing into volcanoes. The implications could be huge as they look to take advantage of the Earth’s inner heat.
The goal: create the hottest hole in the world, a steaming 400 to 1,000 °C.
The reason for all of this drilling is at that depth, the companies involved in the project expect to find water to be in the form of “supercritical steam”, which holds more heat energy than liquid or gas.
Now this is the cool part: successfully tapping into this steam through the drilled well could provide access to an energy capacity of of 50 megawatts, 10 times the amount of traditional geothermal wells. In the real world, this is the difference between powering 50,000 homes and 5,000 homes from one well alone.
Feel virtual objects for the first time
Microsoft’s research arm this week showcased new mechanically-actuated hand-held controllers that render the shape of virtual objects through physical shape displacement, enabling users to feel 3D surfaces, textures, and forces that match the visual rendering.
The research revolves around the demo of two controllers known as NormalTouch and TextureTouch, which give you the feeling that you’re interacting with a physical object that’s in a digital world. This is all done through 3D tracking which then produces feedback to the user’s finger, seen in the video above as someone hits a ball around a wooden box.
NormalTouch renders object surfaces and provides force feedback using a tiltable and extrudable platform. TextureTouch renders the shape of virtual objects through actuated plastic pins. The potential for the new wave of VR products hitting the market could add a whole new dimension to an already immersive world.
3D printed organs on a chip
Harvard University researchers just finished up an entire 3D-printed organ-on-a-chip with integrated sensors that scientists can use to test the effectiveness of synthetic tissues, normally a practice for animal testing.
The organ-on-a-chip has been created as a synthetic replacement for human internal organs ranging from the heart to even cartilage. The innovation happened once the Harvard researchers integrated sensors into the organ-on-a-chip in order to provide electronic data on structures within the body.
These sensors transfer key data points instantaneously instead of a laborious process of collecting manual readouts through microscopy or high-speed photography. In the future, scientists will be able to take these integrated sensors and the organ-on-a-chip to study tissue performance at a faster rate and with more accuracy than before.
Robot Caterpillars that dance to the music
Coming out of the University of Warsaw is a peculiar little man made bug, that travels according to the light conditions it’s under. Employing liquid crystalline elastomers combined with soft robotics techniques the tiny wafer thin caterpillar begins to move and change shape once it interacts with a spatially modulated laser beam.
The soft robotics used focus on creating bots with a lighter touch, mimicking the movements of more graceful living organisms than the traditional clunky robots were all used to seeing.
The way it moves is thanks to the light-sensitive materials that are aligned in a particular molecular pattern which are then disrupted and change shape when subjected to light. It’s movements include climbing inclines, moving objects ten times its size and getting into little nooks.
Soft robotics is an especially interesting field for the space and medicine field were the weight of an item and its flexibility is especially important.
