ARX-3 | Sean Graves

ARX-3: Applied Research Exploration

Sean Graves, Luke Blascovich, Emily Lickert, Eva Mischler, Brandon Barber, Daniel Yates, Dr. Albert To

This project consists of researching the foundations of a specific technology that has been purely academic thus far and ideating new possible fields of industry where it could be commercialized.

Skills that were utilized included:

Human Centered Design
Ideation
Concept Mapping
Ethnographic Research

Overview

Projects of this nature include a deep dive of the human centered design process including ethnographic research, concept mapping, ideation, and rapid prototyping. The team researched the foundations of metal additive manufacturing, the future of this technology, and new possible fields of industry where this cutting-edge technology could be applied.

Our focus was on the work done at the AMRL Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. This lab focuses on design optimization for metal additive manufacturing. Two key aspects of this technology include:

Optimization of internal lattice structures to decrease weight and print time
Algorithm to predict residual stress prior to printing

This technology has been used almost exclusively for academic research. Dr. To consulted my team about formulating possible marketable uses for metal additive manufacturing. Human centered design was used to discover new applications for this technology.

The first step of this project was conducting extensive research on not only metal additive manufacturing, but additive manufacturing in general.

Once cursory research was completed, multiple human centered design activities were done in Miro. Some activities included journey maps, relationship maps, and creative matrices. All of these promoted creativity and helped discover possible commercial uses for this technology. We focused heavily on the FEA algorithm and density optimization technology that metal additive manufacturing has in store.

At the end of the project, the team settled on three concepts that could utilize the benefits of additive manufacturing. Firstly, creating a slicing software similar to Cura where it makes metal additive manufacturing more user-friendly and accessible. Another solution consisted of a program that allows a user to create custom infill patterns within 3D printed parts. Thirdly, we hypothesized using the lattice-density-optimization feature of additive manufacturing in the shipping industry to optimize package organization in trucks.

Back to Projects