Abstract
Wearable medical devices are becoming more and more important in today’s society such that patients are not required to have extended stays in hospitals or have to carry around large medical equipment with them wherever they go. Smart watches are becoming fairly popular among people for a variety of reasons, but one is that it allows users to track their heart rate. Using FFF, we would be able to create a housing for a devices to measure blood pressure, temperature, or heart rate that could be worn like a watch. Alternatively, this idea could be utilized for any other wearable technology that requires an electronic housing.
The novelty of this concept lies in the fact that with FFF, many designs, that were almost impossible to manufacture can easily be printed with/without supports. Also, ability to customize designs and print them with bare minimum additional cost makes this concept economically viable. An example could be a blood pressure/heart rate monitoring device as a wearable bracelet for kids with a cool mickey mouse head. With flexible, transparent and strong filaments, wearable devices could be easily printed integrating the requirement of individual end customer.
By integrating electronic components into the FFF component, we can reduce internal features and make the part more robust. This can allow parts to be made that won’t require assembly. Additionally, products that require customization can take advantage of the flexibility of AM. Combining these aspects can allow a product to be designed that surpasses the limitations of current conventional manufacturing processes, thereby significantly reducing the product lead time.
This idea is a proof of concept for a fully automated Digital Manufacturing1.
Challenges
- Designing the housing for embedding electronic component is the biggest challenge as of now. Part orientation ,number and size of components, placement of components, fixtures for proper embedding withing the interior of the design are all to be considered to during the design phase itself.
- Determination of exact layer height during printing to embed each component.
- Careful print/pause of the fff printer for quick and efficient placement of electronic components.
- Creating fixture and robot arms to automatically allow the components to be assembled during the printing process.
Conceptual design
For a proof of concept, a cuboid was modeled in SolidWorks with path for circuitry inside. The printing process was then simulated in CURA to analyse the printing failure. Initial results are promising.
As shown in the above images, the one on the left has intersecting contours with a vertical laying of wires. This could be an issue as early placement of wires would interfere with the path of travel of extruder, whereas, laying of circuit might not even be possible at the end of the print.
The image on the right shows a better orientation for the circuitry path embedded within a FFF printed part. The printing process can be paused to place different components and then resumed.
Creating robot arms to automatically embed electronic components would require design of such parts as well as integration of them with the printer software. Thus, the work for this project will be limited to manual placement of components.
Team Members
Aaron Faubel, Edward Chen, Subodh Subedi
Ref:
- The third industrial revolution (https://www.economist.com/leaders/2012/04/21/the-third-industrial-revolution)