TINA CASEY
The development of ultra-fast, ultra-cheap manufacturing technologies has become a national priority, so much so that DARPA, the Defense Department’s premier advanced research agency, has put out the call for innovators to come up a whole new approach to getting stuff off the drawing board and into action as quickly as possible. Scientists at North Carolina State University have devised a light-based 3D assembly process seemingly based on Shrinky Dinks, the popular children’s craft toy.The researchers have created flat forms of shape memory polymers that quickly assemble themselves into three-dimensional shapes, simply by exposing them the infrared light of a heat lamp. The team described the results in a paper published in the journal Soft Matter.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=104562