MSE SEMINAR
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Room 610, M&M Building
Characterizing Complex Microstructures in a Three-Phase
Eutectic
John & Virginia Towers Distinguished Lecture Series
Amber L. Genau, PhD
Assistant Professor
Materials Science and Engineering
University of Alabama at Birmingham
The 3-D printing revolution has changed the way we think about plastics. Everything from children’s toys to office supplies to high-value laboratory equipment can be printed. The potential savings of producing goods at the household- and lab-scale is remarkable, especially when producers use old prints and recycle them.
Michigan Tech beat out over 200 universities—including second-place Princeton—to win the Shapeways 3D Printing Campus Battle Grand Prize. Each student that participated receives the following:
The physical prizes are en route and will be distributed by Professor Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE).
Yun Hang Hu, Charles and Carroll McArthur Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
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If it were the end of the world as we know it, we’d be fine, according to Michigan Technological University professor Joshua Pearce.
“People have been doing catastrophic risk research for a while,” says Pearce. “But most of what’s been done is dark, apocalyptic and dismal. It hasn’t provided any real solutions.”
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Michigan Tech hockey is pleased to announce a partnership with ArcelorMittal in the 7th Man T-shirt Project. ArcelorMittal has purchased 850 T-shirts for Michigan Tech students to wear at the home-opening series against the University of Michigan on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1.
“I would like to thank ArcelorMittal and Joe Nowosad (MSE ’87) for sponsoring our 7th Man T-shirts,” Tech hockey coach Mel Pearson said. “Any time you host a team like the University of Michigan, it’s a big deal. It’s going to be an exciting weekend of hockey here at the MacInnes Student Ice Arena, and we’re happy our student section will be covered in gold.”
One hundred of the ArcelorMittal 7th Man T-shirts will be handed out at a live radio remote in the Van Pelt and Opie Library on Wednesday, Oct. 29. The hockey team and coaching staff will be on campus promoting the series against Michigan.
The remaining 750 7th Man T-shirts will be handed out at the Experience Tech student entrance at the John MacInnes Student Ice Arena before Friday night’s game.
“We are honored with this opportunity to be the first company to sponsor the 7th Man at Michigan Tech,” Jake Haelfrisch, an engineer at ArcelorMittal said. “ArcelorMittal is very proud to work with such a great partner over the past eight years. The engineers that we’ve hired from Michigan Tech are at all levels of our corporation and this sponsorship is the least we could do to recognize this partnership. We hope that we see an arena filled with Husky Gold. Go Huskies.”
ArcelorMittal employs more than 60 Michigan Tech graduates, and is the world’s leading steel and mining company, with around 232,000 employees in more than 60 countries. They are the leader in all major global steel markets, including automotive, construction, household appliances and packaging. Underpinning all their operations is a philosophy to produce safe, sustainable steel. See the ArcelorMittal website for more information.
“It’s great to see all the Michigan Tech graduates that ArcelorMittal employs,” added Pearson. “They obviously see a value in our students, and we’re thankful that they’re now going to partner our department and team.”
3D printing guru Joshua Pearce wants nothing more than to provide the means of production to everyone, especially people in developing regions who must get by on very little. But there has been a drawback.
3D printers make all manner of fun and useful things, but they do require electricity. And the grid is notoriously unreliable in many parts of the world. “What do you do if the power goes out while you are right in the middle of printing something?” says Pearce, an associate professor at Michigan Technological University. “It’s not good.”
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It’s old news that open-source 3D printing is cheaper than conventional manufacturing, not to mention greener and incredibly useful for making everything from lab equipment to chess pieces. Now it’s time to add another star to the 3D printing constellation. It may help lift some of the world’s most destitute people from poverty while cleaning up a major blight on the earth and its oceans: plastic trash.
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Furnishing a research lab can be pretty expensive. Now a team led by an engineer at Michigan Technological University has published an open-source library of designs that will let scientists slash the cost of one commonly used piece of equipment: the syringe pump. Syringe pumps are used to dispatch precise amounts of liquid, as for drug delivery or mixing chemicals in a reaction. They can also cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
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Twenty-two high school teachers from all across Michigan–including two from Houghton High School–are building their own 3D printers at Michigan Tech this week. During the 3-day workshop, the teachers will build and learn to use open source 3-D printers, which they will take back to their schools. The program was developed Joshua M. Pearce, Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering.
The printers are capable of printing most of their own parts–and just about anything their students can imagine.
This is the second year Michigan Tech has helped teachers build 3D printers for use in their own classrooms. Last year each 2-teacher team built one printer to share. At many of the schools, use was so high that one turned out not to be enough, so the printers were re-designed to reduce the time it takes to build them, improve printing and reliability and reduce cost. Now each teacher gets to build one of his/her own.
