Week 12 Blog Entry

 Reflection: 

In today's lesson we got our keyring back when we designed it in our previous lesson in Fusion360 and saved it as a STL file. We learnt how it was 3D printed and converted into a file suitable to be 3D printed. First, the STL file would be converted into G-code file that would interpreted by the machine's firmware to be 3D printed. Afterwards, we delved into deeper how our keyring was made by introducing us to digital fabrication. Digital fabrication is important as society is getting increasingly digitalized and manufacturers are shifting towards advanced manufacturing technologies. Digital fabrication helps us to make our products quickly and is fully customizable to individuals needs. It is important for us to learn digital fabrication as it is growing rapidly in the chemical engineering field, for instance, the use of additive technology in oil & gas industry.

The advantages of digital fabrication includes physical evaluation of design. performing functional testing before committing a full production run and printing numerous design iterations to identify and remove errors before production. Furthermore, it allows longer lifespan for older equipment by printing obsolete parts, reverses engineer spare parts and customizes high value/ low value End-Use production.

After brief intro to digital fabrication, we were split into our groups to perform a presentation and peer teaching to the class. Our group was assigned 'Slicer Setting for Quality Printout'. We used the helpful sites provided in the ppt slides to aid in our research and did further research as well to ensure that our explanation were clear and understandable. We searched for as many photos as we could for each description so that our audience would have a better understanding of what we we will be presenting. We briefly discussed how slicer setting such as layer height, print speed, part orientation, bed adhesion and support affect the quality of a printout and introduced important 3D printing terminologies such as overhang, bridging, infill and wall thickness. Through this teaching, we acquired more knowledge on the 3D printing technologies, design requirements for quality and fast printing and latest news in 3D printing. Our presentation slides can be viewed here: CP5065_2A01_G3_Slicer Settings for Quality

From our peer-teaching, some of the knowledge we have learnt is that slicing is the designated object that is turned into layers, infill is the extra material printed inside the object to avoid collapse, supports are needed for overhang and bridging objects, common thermoplastics used for 3D printing are PLA, ABS, PETG and TPU. Moreover, the higher the infill density, the higher the printing time and brim is used to improve the adhesion between the object and build plate and layer height, print speed, fan speed and nozzle temperature of the slicer settings affect print quality.

Lastly, we were tasked to complete and online quiz to assess our understanding of the lesson we have learnt today. Overall, the lesson was very interesting as we learnt more about how 3D printing works and its application. It will definitely be useful to us when we start designing our chemical product with 3D printing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 14 Blog Entry

Image
 Reflection: Today's lesson we learnt about product sketching and design specifications. Design sketching/drawing is essential in producing our chemical product as it enhances understanding, provide visual clues for possible further refinements and revisions of the product and improve communication with our clients. To prepare ourselves to draw our chemical product as part of our Activity 1, we were first tasked to draw lines, curves, circles and ellipses as it is the fundamental basics in sketching. Next, we were introduced to one point and two point perspectives where one point perspective has a single vanishing point whereas two point perspective has two vanishing points. The members perspectives drawing can be seen below: Katrina - 1-point perspective Katrina - 2-point perspective Ashwati - 1-point perspective Ashwati - 2-point perspective Jun Lin - 1-point perspective Jun Lin - 2-point perspective Xin Ni - 1-point perspective Xin Ni - 2-point perspective For Activity 1, Xin Ni...
Read more

Week 2 Blog Entry

Image
Reflection For week 2, we were introduced to project ideation and literature review. For project ideation, we were asked to think of something that irritates us, makes our life easier or benefits our friends and family to start generating ideas for creating a device. After that, we chose interesting ideas from the past or current FYP students to help in our creativity and innovation. Next, we learnt about assessing our current research effectively with literature review through the use of SDL learning methods and meta-cognition model of thinking we have learnt in the module CP5202.  Literature review helps us to examine the sources relevant to our research area and provide a critical evaluation and summary of them. The attributes of a good literature review include relevant and reliable sources, sources laying a strong foundation for our research topic, narrowing and eliminating irrelevant information, covering enough information required on a subject and lastly, striking a balance...
Read more

Practical 3

Image
  Pre-session preparation Corrugated fibreboard is a very  versatile  material  that has a wide range of uses   ranging from  material for packing to  containers.   Corrugated materials are pulps   made  from   softwood trees  that  have been   put   through  mechanical and chemical  pulping to break down the fibres. The corrugator is a continuous system designed to adhere sheets of paper that shapes bulk corrugated boards. It consists of 3    components: corrugated material in the center, outer and inner liners. During  manufacture, each side of the corrugated material is glued to the flat paper liner to   add rigidity and stability while fixing the flutes in position.  Additional fluting section   and liner can be added to help add strength and rigidity which can give different wall types (single/double/tri-wall). During recycle, the cardboard is separated from other mate...
Read more