Out from the printer, put it to work.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A team of graduate engineering students at Cornell University, led by Ph.D. student Apoorva Kiran, has constructed the first-ever consumer electronic device entirely created by a 3D printer.
Kiran led the team with Robert MacCurdy, a fellow mechanical engineer graduate student. While 3D printing has been around for years, Kiran and his team have gone from printing “passive†parts – components that can’t do anything on their own and must be connected to other components and/or a power source in order to function – to active parts.
In other words, their loudspeaker device can be used exactly as it is when it comes out of the printer, which is a huge leap in engineering and 3D printing.
The team was able to obtain materials that could be put into the 3D printer and come out ready to use. All they needed was to connect their speaker to an audio device that played the audio. In this case, it was a passage from President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union in which he discussed the future possibilities of 3D printing.
A loudspeaker consists of just three basic components: a plastic housing, a conductive coil, and a magnet. To construct all three of these, Kiran used simple red plastic for the housing material, silver ink for the conducting material and a blend of strontium ferrite for the magnet.
The latter component was particularly difficult, as it had to have a specific viscosity that doesn’t occur regularly, and was developed in partnership with another Indian American student, Samanvaya Srivastava, who is a Cornell graduate student in chemical and biomolecular engineering.
The team used a printer model called Fab@Homes; despite the name of the machine, it is not consumer-level. In fact, 3D printing likely won’t be available for use at home for several years, due to how expensive and relatively new the technology is. But Kiran and his team hope that their loudspeaker project has cracked the surface of what 3D printing technology can truly achieve.
A native of Bihar, Kiran currently resides in Ithaca, New York, where Cornell is located. He earned his B.Tech in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering and Physics at the Indian Institute of technology (IIT) in Madras, and then earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) in Bangalore. He earned an MHRD India Fellowship to attend the IIS, and is currently on a prestigious McMullen Fellowship to attend Cornell.
A video of Kiran and members of his team constructing their loudspeaker with the 3D printer can be viewed below:
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com