Category: News

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) was interviewed for the article “Michigan Tech Researchers Publish Paper on New Recyclebot 3D Printer,” published in 3D Print Pulse, Ichiban Electronic Blog and 3DPrint.com among other sites.

Michigan Tech Researchers Publish Paper on New Recyclebot 3D Printer

Dr. Pearce is a major proponent for sustainability, and has also studied filament recycling in the past. In the 2017 study, Dr. Pearce and the rest of his team discussed the development of a solar-powered version of the open source “recyclebot,” an extruder for waste plastic that he designed back in 2013.

In a new paper, titled “RepRapable Recyclebot: Open source 3-D printable extruder for converting plastic to 3-D printing filament,” Dr. Pearce and his team relay their continued development of the innovative recyclebot, including the full plans, list of parts, and assembly instructions for the device, which was designed for FFF 3D printer-based filament research.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2018.e00026

Co-authors of the paper include Michigan Tech’s Aubrey L. Woern, Joseph R. McCaslin, Adam M. Pringle, and Dr. Pearce.

Read more at 3D Print Pulse, by Sarah Saunders.

In the News

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) was featured in the article “Recyclebot an Open-Source 3D Printable Extruder for Converting Plastic to 3D Printing Filament.” in Inside 3D Printing.

Research by undergraduate Aubrey Woern (MEEM) and Joseph McCaslin (ECE), in collaboration with graduate student Adam Pringle (MSE) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) was featured in the article, “RepRapable Recyclebot: Open-Source-Extruder recycelt Filament,” in the German Make Magazine.

In Print

Undergraduate students Aubrey Woern (MEEM) and Joseph McCaslin (ECE) in collaboration with graduate student Adam Pringle (MSE) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) published “RepRapable Recyclebot: Open Source 3D Printable Extruder for Converting Plastic to 3-D Printing Filament” in  HardwareX.

PhD student Khalid Khan (ECE) and Lucia Gauchia (ECE/ME) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) published  Self-sufficiency of 3-D printers: utilizing stand-alone solar photovoltaic power systems, in Renewables: Wind, Water, and Solar.

Jeremy Bos (ECE) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $5,000 research and development contract with the University of Michigan. Darrell Robinette (MEEM/ICC) is the Co-PI on the project “Robust Terrain Identification and Path Planning for Autonomous Ground Vehicles in Unstructured Environments.” The is the first year of a potential three-year project totaling $304,525.

By Sponsored Programs.

HOUGHTON — Autonomous vehicles will spell major changes for Americans, including those living in rural areas.

Using Houghton as an area for a case study, a team of Michigan Technological University students set out to investigate possible impacts within rural areas.

The class was tasked with determining environmental, social and economic impacts of Level 4 autonomous vehicles, part of a competition known as the AutoDrive Challenge. Level 4 refers to vehicles that are self-diving but unable to deal with every scenario.

Once the results came in, the team was surprised by the level of neutral responses, with 20-30 percent answering questions as neutral, said Cameron Burke, an electrical and computer engineering student.

Unexpected topics, such as land use and parking situations, were also raised by participants. The team determined there would need to be significant changes to infrastructure, Burke said.

“We found that for autonomous vehicles to be even desirable in a community like this, there would have to be a lot of infrastructure changes,” he said.

Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Kali Katerberg.

Related:

Take Me Home, Country Roads: The Future of Autonomous and Electric Vehicles in Rural Areas

Tony Pinar (ECE), Tim Havens (ECE/CS) and Joe Rice’s (CS) paper, titled “Efficient Multiple Kernel Classification Using Feature and Decision Level Fusion,” in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems was one of two papers from the transactions featured in IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine as a CIS Publication Spotlight.

DOI: 10.1109/TFUZZ.2016.2633372

Extract: Kernel methods for classification is a well-studied area in which data are implicitly mapped from a lower-dimensional space to a higher dimensional space to improve classification accuracy. However, for most kernel methods, one must still choose a kernel to use for the problem. Since there is, in general, no way of knowing which kernel is the best, multiple kernel learning (MKL) is a technique used to learn the aggregation of a set of valid kernels into a single (ideally) superior kernel.

Read more at III Xplore Digital Library.

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) gave an invited talk for the University of Lorraine entitled “Will you 3D print your next lab? : Leveraging Improvements in Distributed Manufacturing for Open Source Scientific Hardware” at the Lorraine Fab Living Lab in Nancy, France.

The visit was covered by the regional newspaper L’Est Republicain(circulation >123,000).

In Print

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) authored the chapter “Open-source 3D Printing” in “Managing Humanitarian Innovation: The cutting edge of aid.” Editors: Eric James and Abigail Taylor, 2018, Practical Action Publishing.

eISBN: 978-178044-953-1 | ISBN: 978-185339-953-4 doi:https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780449531.021

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) authored “Expanding the Consumer Bill of Rights for material ingredients,” in Materials Today.

In the News

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE), John Gershenson (MEEM), and alumni Tobias J. Mahan and Benjamin L. Savonen are mentioned in the article “Researchers Develop the Kijenzi 3D Printer to Respond to Humanitarian Crises,” in 3DPrint.com.

Research by Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE), was featured in the story “Solar Microgrids for National Security: Study Finds 17 GW Could Fortify US Military Bases,” originally posted in May, 2017. The story was referenced recently in Microgrid Knowledge.

On the Road

Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) gave an invited talk, “Production for the People: How open source hardware design and 3D printing enable real distributed manufacturing,” at the 20th Finnish Rapid Prototyping Association Conference and Nordic3DExpo last Thursday (April 19) in Espoo, Finland.

Husam Sweidan, PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Timothy Havens (ECE), published an article entitled, “Sensor Relocation for Improved Target Tracking,” in the April, 2018, volume of IET Wireless Sensor Systems.

DOI: 10.1049/iet-wss.2017.0037 , Print ISSN 2043-6386, Online ISSN 2043-6394

Extract: In the first phase, the wireless sensor network tracks the targets based on the initial deployment. The second phase uses the location estimates from phase 1 to form a region of interest (ROI). The last phase carries out the sensor relocation to the ROI.

Sumit Paudyal (ECE) is the principal investigator on a project that has received $500,000 from the National Science Foundation. The project is entitled “CAREER: Operation of Distribution Grids in the Context of High-Penetration Distributed Energy Resources and Flexible Loads.”

This is a five-year project.

Abstract

The number of distributed energy resources (DERs) and flexible loads such as photovoltaic (PV) panels, electric vehicles (EVs), and energy storage systems (ESSs) are rapidly growing at the consumer end. These small distributed devices connect to low voltage power distribution grids via power electronic interfaces that can support bi-directional power flows. Despite being small in size, if aggregated, these devices a provide significant portion of the energy and ancillary services (e.g., reactive power support, frequency regulation, load following) necessary for reliable and secure operation of electric power grids. In future distribution grids, with numerous such small active devices, real-time control and aggregation will entail computational challenges. The computational challenges further increase when the aggregation requires coordination with legacy grid control actions which involve integer decision variables, such as load tap changers, capacitor banks, and network switches. This CAREER project concentrates around solving operational and computational issues for distribution grids with large penetration of DERs and flexible loads.

Read more at the National Science Foundation.