Lets
take the Industrial Revolution. Caught up in the fervour of the digital
revolution of the late 1990s, it is hard to imagine that there was actually
a revolution preceding that. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution of the
eighteenth century is the single largest contributor to our way of life
today. It brought us efficient energy conversion-machines to do our
work and through the machines, electricity and transportation –
critical parts of our daily life today. Eventually, it also brought
us the digital revolution and today’s wired world. Moore’s
Law has stood the test of time when it comes to processing power. Storage
has consistently surpassed even that. Furthermore, power technology
has grown in leaps and bounds. Along the way, these changes and the
economies of scale have brought computing power down to areas such as
printing and machine tools. The invasion has been so subtle that most
of us are unaware of the technology behind some of the most mundane
products in our daily life.
Core technology
Consider something as simple as the inkjet printer. While the core
technology seems very simple – it is just an array of nozzles that
fire at the right moment, depositing ink on paper – it has a wide
range of uses in everything from automobile engineering to tissue culture.
It has been used to build rapid prototyping machines such as those from
Z Corp and found its way into printed electronics research, and have
even replaced fuel injectors in the nextgeneration jet engines.
Showing the way The core technology
behind inkjet printing has also found its way into machine tools, with
a company called EoPlex Technologies showing the way. EoPlex Technologies
Inc is a Californiabased startup specialising in manufacturing miniature
devices. Its edge on the competition is that it has figured out how
to print complex components containing multiple materials and circuits
on a large scale without tooling. The functional difference Conceptually
similar to rapid prototyping processes such as three-dimensional (3D)
printing, EoPlex is however different. While rapid prototyping processes
create models of products or one-off prototypes, EoPlex products are
actually functional components. EoPlex can produce thousands of complex
components at the same time containing chambers, channels, sensors,
circuits, reactors and energy scavengers. They can be made of a combination
of metals, ceramics and polymers. The computer-aided design file is
first split up into a number of layers, similar to 3D printing and computerised
tomography scans. Then the layers are printed one after the other with
specialised 'inks' being used as required. These inks later react in
the postprocessing steps to leave behind conductors,metals, ceramics,
and dielectrics. Cavities are built by using sacrificial ‘ink’
that is also removed in post processing. Once the various layers are
built up and the component achieves its final shape, it is heat treated
to meet various requirements and then fired. The sacrificial materials
are removed at this stage and the ceramic and the metal powders are
sintered and fused together.
Current developments
EoPlex is currently developing a number of novel products using
this process. One of the first is an energy-harvesting module for tyre
pressure sensors in cars. All cars produced from 2007 in the US will
be required to carry tyre pressure monitors that continuously gauge
the state of the tyre. This requirement was put into law primarily for
safety considerations after people were killed in rollover accidents
of sports utility vehicles (SUVs). The fault was finally traced to under-inflated
tyres. However, the sensors will also result in better fuel economy.
Sensors such as
....CONTD
