Model Airplanes

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) grew its national integrated virtual 3D printing network from three hospitals in early 2017 to 20 at the close of 2018.

The expanding network, which started at VA’s Puget Sound Health Care System, allows VA health care staff to share ideas, solve problems and pool resources on best practice uses of 3D printing to improve the health care of the nation’s over 20 million veterans.

Artificial heart created on a three-dimensional printer.Getty

According to the VA, Veterans Health Administration (VHA) “innovators across the 20 sites are using 3D printing to solve a wide range of issues, from presurgical planning to manufacturing hand and foot orthotics.”

“The VA remains at the forefront of innovative work in 3D printing by expanding our expertise across VA,” said VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement. “Through this growing virtual network, VA continues to help define how 3D printing technology will be used broadly in medicine for the benefit of patients.”

Prints of model kidneys for patients with renal cancer now aid surgeons at the Puget Sound Health Care System. The prints allow physicians to plan their surgical approaches to save normal kidney tissue and avoid disturbing unaffected vessels that surround a tumor. The technology also saves hours of surgeons’ time which also reduces the time patients are under anesthesia and increases operating room availability.

Occupational therapists at the VA are also using 3D printers

Article source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2019/01/31/expanding-3d-printing-network-aims-to-improve-us-veterans-health-care/

“It looks like something you might find aboard the Starship Enterprise,” said Jeremy Thomas, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

He was talking about a projector that can beam a three-dimensional video into a container of photosensitive resin (pictured, photo by Hossein Heidari, UC Berkeley). The container then rotates for a few minutes, lets the fluids drain and then leaves behind a complete, fully formed 3D object.

“Though it seems like science fiction, it’s not, thanks to scientists and engineers at LLNL and UC Berkeley, who have developed a brand-new high-speed 3D printing method called Computed Axial Lithography (CAL),” Thomas said in an announcement about the procedure.

The method is described a paper printed in the journal “Science,” published online Jan. 31.

“This is a breakthrough in the space of possible methods to do additive manufacturing,” said LLNL engineer Maxim Shusteff, a co-author on the paper.

“What this approach does is make it possible for interesting polymer parts to be made much more quickly, which is often a bottleneck, and we can now think about using materials that don’t work well with slower layer-by-layer methods.”

Thomas said that LLNL and UC Berkeley have filed a joint patent on the technology, which builds on and leaps beyond the pioneering work on multibeam manufacturing, or VAM.

CAL creates entire parts at once, using projected photons to illuminate a syrup-like resin, creating a continuously shifting video of projections as the vial rotates. Like a CT scan done in reverse, the projections combine to form a

Article source: https://pleasantonweekly.com/blogs/p/2019/01/31/livermore-labs-breakthrough-advances-3d-printing-applications

In contrast to other aviation schools in Nigeria that cost as much as $41,000 annually, the International College of Aeronautics charges a $413 fee, currently subsidized to $235. Joshua Ajibode, one of the commercially licensed pilots who leads the flight operations department, noted that piloting students need a minimum of about 250 flying hours to gain their license, but need 1,500 hours to qualify for a job with a commercial airline.

That gap has left more than 300 Nigerian pilots unemployed, despite a high demand for their services in the country. “There’s nowhere to build experience,” noted Solomon Adio, the college’s founder. “It’s one of the problems we have, and that’s why many jobs are taken by expatriates.” 

For Adio, part of the solution is to build Nigerian aircraft. Nigeria imports its planes, and most of them are expensive to fly. In September, five of the college’s students who traveled to Missouri along with Adio completed building their first short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft at a U.S. partner, Zenith Aircraft Co.

Adio said the long-term goal is to build a fleet of Nigerian aircraft at the college. “It will make it cheaper to fly and affordable for the students.”

He also expects the aircraft will allow students to branch into private aviation, which he says will create more jobs. The college is already in discussions with potential aircraft buyers, including government agencies, emergency services, and police.

Students would also be allowed to use the aircraft their class builds to launch business enterprises. “It’s very innovative because we’re not

Article source: https://world.wng.org/2019/01/taking_flight