Keene State students hone 3D skills
As published on page one of the Dec. 12, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
The facade of the Keene State College Alumni Center is a mix of old and new -- in more ways than meet the eye.
On the southern part of the otherwise modern-looking building, the restored porch of a historic wood-frame house faces Main Street.
Norm J. Fisk was looking over the 10 identical columns that support that porch one afternoon last week.
"I really can't tell which one it is," he said, sounding slightly disappointed.
On a previous visit, he thought, he had solved the puzzle -- but looking again he wasn't so sure.
"If you got up on a ladder you could tell, because it doesn't have any wood carving marks," he said.
"It" is the imposter.
Nine of the columns have capitols made of wood more than 100 years old, while the tenth was fabricated last year out of ABS plastic in the Regional Center for Advanced Manufacturing, which Fisk runs at Keene State.
The piece was made on a 3-D printer, a gray and black machine the rough size and shape of a refrigerator. Peering through an almost-opaque window when the machine is running, you can catch a glimpse of moving parts and an object slowly taking shape inside.
"These machines can make a solid part that you can hold in your hand with no machining," Fisk said. The specifications of the object are sent from a computer to the device. "It becomes just like printing a Word document, only you get a model."
Historical preservation isn't how the machines are usually used.
Instead, they are teaching tools, incorporated into coursework by instructors such as Assistant Professor Lisa Hix, who developed Keene State's major in Sustainable Product Design and Innovation (SPDI, pronounced "speedy.")
Standing in the center's temporary base on Ralston Street -- the workshop will have a new home in a building going up on Winchester Street in the fall -- Hix explained how one student, after ankle surgery left him on crutches, used clay to design an ergonomic handle to replace the crutch's standard foam padding.
A 3-D scanner converted the model into a computer file that could be read using computer-aided design, or CAD, software. Then the student, senior SPDI major Alex A. Cobban, used the 3-D printer to make a mold of the design.
"He did it on CAD, and this built while he was out doing other things," Hix said, holding up the white plastic mold.
Visitors to the workshop were invited to feel how neatly a piece of foam that had been shaped in the mold fits the hand. Cobban is considering selling the product commercially.
The printers are a fast and resource-efficient way for engineering and design students to take their work off the page and into the real world.
Another senior SPDI major, Joseph T. Broderick, held up a plastic model of a thermostat housing that had been printed to test the design.
"There's a lot of time invested to make that part, whereas it's a lot easier to make it out of plastic first," he said.
In another class project, the two students are reverse-engineering the carburetor from the engine of a 1965 Mustang.
Cobban estimates the meticulous process of measuring the component parts, loading those measurements into the CAD software, and then printing the pieces to fit them together will take about two weeks.
All this experience with cutting-edge technology pays off for students in the real world.
Months from graduation, Cobban is already doing contract work for companies, and Broderick has had successful internships two years in a row.
Last year's 12 SPDI graduates are employed across the country, Hix said, from the Stratham-based Timberland shoe company to a company that designs surf boards in Hawaii.
"A picture is worth a thousand words," Fisk said, "but a model is worth a thousand pictures."
tagged with: 3D printing, Keene State College, manufacturing, Regional Center for Advanced Manufacturing
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