One of the things I first noticed when I joined the University a (ahem!) ‘few’ years ago was that everywhere you looked, people were excited! Excited about their specific area of work, excited about the other things going on across their Department and the broader University, or generally just excited. And of course there’s never a better time to be excited than as we get closer to Christmas!
Here in the Advanced Polymer Sintering laboratory we’ve got a team of staff and PhD students working in the area of Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing). The processes we work with all involve melting cross-sections of a polymer (plastic) powder, one after the other, until we have a finished part, and one of their major benefits is that they can very easily make really complicated shapes. This might be objects that have a very curvy or complicated geometry, or sometimes it might even include moving parts or parts within other parts (imagine a ship in a bottle, but all produced in the same material in a single process).
Having said that, a lot of the parts we make within our group are really not that interesting in terms of their shapes! We spend a lot of time working out what’s happening during the process of melting our powders, and what things we can change on our machines to give us better melting and therefore stronger parts. All of which means we spend a lot of time making ‘standard’ test samples, which are normally very simple shapes.
So, when it comes to Christmas time, we like to make the most of what we’ve got! A few years ago Wendy Birtwistle, one of our excellent technical staff, found some designs of Christmas tree decorations she could download and send to one of our printers. This started a bit of a tradition within our group, where she finds a new decoration to make each year. You can see by the image how nice the tree in our lab looks each year.
If you’re somewhere nearby next Christmas time, perhaps you might want to pop in for a look!