Teams from Waterloo Engineering took the top two prizes in a recent international student design competition involving the use of 3D printing technology to manage the heat created during energy generation, conversion, transfer and storage.
Both teams were comprised of graduate students at the Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing (MSAM) lab, the most comprehensive academic research and development centre in Canada for additive manufacturing processes.
More than 15 teams from around the world competed in the 3D Digital Manufacturing Challenge, which is sponsored by the Society for Manufacturing Engineers (SME) to encourage students to explore the design freedom offered by 3D printing.
The first-place winners of $1,000 and other prizes, announced at an industry conference in Detroit this week, were Gitanjali Shanbhag and Lisa Brock, who redesigned a heat sink for cooling central processing units (CPUs) in electronic devices.
Finishing behind them in second place were Alex Martinez, Sagar Patel and Pablo Enrique for a project involving the use of additive manufacturing with composite biomaterials to make blades for wind turbines.
Graduate students (left to right) Ken Nsiempba, Lisa Brock, Gitanjali Shanbhag, Sagar Patel and Alex Martinez pose at the recent awards event with Mihaela Vlasea (third from left), a professor and associate research director at the MSAM Lab.
More details on this research work and the challenge are posted here.