TIET Newsletter

Creating Luxurious Custom Wood Pieces using Subtractive Wood Manufacturing Technology

A high-speed 3D printing technology invented by Desktop Metal offers architects, designers and manufacturers a new way to produce luxurious custom wood pieces for home decor, interiors, transportation, and architectural design with a superior environmental footprint, new geometries and quality unavailable from subtractive wood manufacturing technology. This technology allows to take something that was previously wood waste and re-materialize it into exquisitely beautiful and useful things.

At the core of this innovation is the Forust process, which combines two waste streams from traditional wood production, sawdust and lignin, to sustainably produce isotropic, high-strength wood parts. Depending on the size of the parts, Forust can manufacture wood products using A 3D printer, which supports prints up to two cubic meters in volume at speeds in excess of 100 liters of parts per hour. During the printing process, layers of specially treated sawdust are spread and selectively joined by a non-toxic and biodegradable binder. Digital grain is printed on every layer and parts can then be sanded, stained, polished, dyed, coated and refinished in the same manner as traditionally manufactured wood components.Forust offers nearly unlimited design flexibility-- from exotic grain structures to grainless wood textures and a myriad of grain types. And, because they are made from a wood and bioresin compound, these parts exhibit the functionality and stiffness in line with conventional wood. Forust is set to revolutionize volume production of wood parts through a completely digital manufacturing process.

Earlier a team of biologists and computer scientists from Tufts University and the University of Vermont (UVM) created novel, tiny self-healing biological machines from frog cells called "Xenobots" that could move around, push a payload, and even exhibit collective behavior in the presence of a swarm of other Xenobots.The same team has now created life forms that self-assemble a body from single cells, do not require muscle cells to move, and even demonstrate the capability of recordable memory. The new generation Xenobots also move faster, navigate different environments, and have longer lifespans than the first edition, and they still have the ability to work together in groups and heal themselves if damaged. The results of the new research were published today in Science Robotics.

Compared to Xenobots 1.0, in which the millimeter-sized automatons were constructed in a "top down" approach by manual placement of tissue and surgical shaping of frog skin and cardiac cells to produce motion, the next version of Xenobots takes a "bottom up" approach. The biologists at Tufts took stem cells from embryos of the African frog Xenopuslaevis (hence the name "Xenobots") and allowed them to self-assemble and grow into spheroids, where some of the cells after a few days differentiated to produce cilia -- tiny hair-like projections that move back and forth or rotate in a specific way. Instead of using manually sculpted cardiac cells whose natural rhythmic contractions allowed the original Xenobots to scuttle around, cilia give the new spheroidal bots "legs" to move them rapidly across a surface. In a frog, or human for that matter, cilia would normally be found on mucous surfaces, like in the lungs, to help push out pathogens and other foreign material. On the Xenobots, they are repurposed to provide rapid locomotion.

A central feature of robotics is the ability to record memory and use that information to modify the robot's actions and behavior. With that in mind, the Tufts scientists engineered the Xenobots with a read/write capability to record one bit of information, using a fluorescent reporter protein called EosFP, which normally glows green. However, when exposed to light at 390nm wavelength, the protein emits red light instead.The researchers tested the memory function and found that in future it can be used to detect and record not only the light but also the presence of radioactive contamination, chemical pollutants, drugs, or a disease condition. Further engineering of the memory function could enable the recording of multiple stimuli (more bits of information) or allow the bots to release compounds or change behavior upon sensation of stimuli.