Additive manufacturing at university of Navarra - tecnunApplications for industry, medicine and sports

Resumen

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the process of joining materials to build objects layer upon layer from 3D model data. Its importance has grown since the late 1980s to the extent that President Obama said “AM has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything”.The Design Unit at University of Navarra–TECNUN got its first AM device in 2004. Since then, TECNUN has done many projects—through public funding and bilateral collaborations with companies that lead to Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD thesis projects—to evaluate the potential of AM.This paper describes some of these projects to show the trajectory that TECNUN has followed since 2004. In particular, under the umbrella of Industry 4.0, the process for embedding sensors to create smart AM parts and how extrusion devices can print electrical conductive paths is described. Moreover, three AM components built for a Formula Student car (oil sump, accelerator pedal and wheel rim) are explained. Furthermore, the fabrication of insoles for diabetic patients using low-cost printers is illustrated. Lastly, a project to create shin-pads with shock-absorbing properties is presented.The future of AM at TECNUN is challenging, especially within Industry 4.0, where smart machine components and wearable devices capable of capturing information from machines and/or people are necessary to objectivize user-machine interactions.