April_AMP_Digital

A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | A P R I L 2 0 2 0 1 0 METALS | POLYMERS | CERAMICS Retech Systems, acquired by Polish conglomerate SECO/ Warwick Group in 2011, signed a more than 10-year lease for space at the city’s Northland Central complex. The company expects to shift 36 jobs from its Ukiah, Calif., location and eventually more than double its workforce to about 80 in western New York. Retech makes furnaces to melt, refine, and cast alloys and metals— including titanium, nickel, and rare earth metals—into parts for aerospace, defense, and medical device manufacturers. www.secowarwick.com/en. Markforged, Watertown, Mass., a leading manufacturer of metal and carbon fiber 3D printers, has released the first generally available technology to 3D-print pure copper. Now available, Markforged’s proprietary printing technology provides an easy and fast way to produce geometrically complex copper with high electrical and thermal conductivity. markforged.com. BRIEFS from the solar telescope. This imaging quality is reportedly made possible by a monolithic 4.26-m mirror made of SCHOTT’s glass-ceramic ZERODUR. The NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope, which is located on the 3,000-m-high Mount Haleakala on the Hawaiian is- land of Maui, is expected to usher in a new era of solar research and enables a leap forward in our understanding of the sun and its impact on our plan- et. The telescope is expected to collect more information about the sun in the first five years of its usage than all the solar data gathered since Galileo’s time. With a thermal expansion coeffi- cient close to zero, the glass-ceramic reportedly enables extreme shape ac- curacy and ensures sharp images from space. www.dkist.nso.edu, schott.com . Lithoz America teammembers (from le to right) Shawn Allan, Nicholas Voellm, and Nicole Ross with a CeraFab 8500 ceramic 3D printer. 3D-PRINTED CERAMICS ON THE SPACE STATION Last November, a spacecraft ar- rived at the International Space Station (ISS), with supplies for the 3D BioFabri- cation Facility (BFF). In addition to hu- man cells and bioinks for BFF, also be- ing tested during this mission are new components of Techshot’s tissue condi- tioning system that were manufactured by Lithoz America LLC. Lithoz partnered with Techshot to develop ceramic fluid manifolds used inside bioreactors, which provide nutri- ents to living materials printed in space by BFF. Reportedly expected to replace the prototype polymer manifolds tested in space this summer, the Lithoz ceram- ic manifolds are being tested aboard the ISS for their biocompatibility, pre- cision, durability, and overall fluid flow properties. The ceramic manifolds were printed using lithography-based ceram- ic manufacturing (LCM) on a high-reso- lution CeraFab printer. Techshot and Lithoz engineers and scientists worked together to optimize the design and the manufacturing pro- cesses required to make it. According to Lithoz, the work highlights an ideal use case for ceramic additive manufac- turing to enable production of a special compact device that could not be pro- duced without additive manufacturing, while enabling a level of bio-compatibil- ity not achievable with printable poly- mers. Techshot engineers were able to interface the larger bio-structures with the Lithoz-printed ceramic manifolds. www.lithoz.com/en. GLASS-CERAMIC COMPOSITE HELPS DELIVER IMAGES OF THE SUN The first images from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Alexandria, Va., show unprecedented details of the sun’s surface and offer a preview of the results that are expected This image of the solar surface was captured with the DKIST Solar Telescope using a mirror substrate made of glass- ceramic composite material. Courtesy of the National Solar Observatory.