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Introduction to 3D-MINTEGRATION |
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Tuesday, 13 March 2007 |
The 3D-MINTEGRATION Grand Challenge Project commenced in October 2005 and is destined to revolutionise the way that small, complex products and components are manufactured. The 4-year £9 million project is investigating methods for manufacturing 3D miniaturised/integrated, or "3D-Mintegrated" systems, and is one of four, supported by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), that are described as "blue sky" research programmes intended to revolutionise manufacturing techniques.
The project is led by Professor Marc Desmulliez of the Scottish Manufacturing Institute (SMI), based at Heriot-Watt University, one of five Innovative Manufacturing Research Centres providing extensive resources and contributing a total of £2.3m. The other centres are: Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (IFM), Cranfield Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (CIMRC), Loughborough Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (LIMCRC), and the Nottingham Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (NIMRC). This consortium is complemented by three leading institutions in Design and Metrology: Brunel and Greenwich universities and the National Physical Laboratory. Furthermore the project partnership extends to 20 companies, committing some £2.8m of support in addition to the £4.1m provided by EPSRC.
Current micro engineering techniques are based upon those used for semiconductors, and so tend to permit only the manufacture of products based on single materials, typically in planar configurations. The project aims to address the restrictive issues of materials and very high capital costs by developing entirely new design and manufacturing techniques underpinned by modelling, simulation and risk mitigation procedures to ensure that they can be exploited by industry with confidence.
The work concentrates upon three manufacturing techniques. These include lamination methods, whereby products are built up from sheets of components and interconnects in a reel-to-reel process, a modular approach where structures are built by joining together 3D blocks, and a folding, origami-like, technique where 2D layers are folded together to occupy a 3D space. In turn these three methods will be applied to three demonstrators: a health and usage monitoring multifunctional sensor, a minifluidic device that will enable chemical/biological processing to be performed within one integrated module, and a truly 3D miniaturised electro-mechanical system.
The revolutionary approaches will require new tools and methods at all steps in the manufacturing process, and as such the project embraces everything from initial design, through to assembly and test. For example, haptic sensing is being investigated in the product design phase. This will immerse designers in the miniaturised product, enabling them to see and feel the effects that design decisions might have on the forces such as stiction and friction that dominate in the micro and nano worlds. Fast and accurate metrology methods are also being investigated that could, for example, perform on the fly measurements as 3D-Mintegrated products pass through a continuous manufacturing process.
The project's deliverables will be guidelines for industry to implement the developed techniques.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 22 August 2007 )
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