Advances in Design and Rapid Prototyping for Heterogeneous Multifunctional Devices

SPEAKER: Professor Suman Das
Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering Department
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2125

ABSTRACT:
This talk describes the development of a new direct write technique for the layered fabrication of meso- and macroscale, compositionally heterogeneous devices. This technique is based on patterned deposition of micro- to nanoscale granular materials through miniature nozzles with a target minimum in-plane feature resolution of 100_m. While substantial theoretical and experimental work has been conducted on large scale hoppers, little or no work exists on the flow of granular materials in miniature hoppers. I will present existing background, the design of our system and the results of experiments in characterizing gravity and vibration assisted flow of spherical sub-125_m particles as function of particle size and nozzle opening. Proof-of-concept demonstrations on patterned powder deposition for a variety of applications will be presented.

BIO:
Suman Das is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor since September 2000. He received his B.S. (1990) in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He obtained his M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (1998) in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas-Austin, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship there during 1999-2000. He is the recipient of the 2003 NSF CAREER award, the 1999 University of Texas Outstanding Dissertation award, the 1998 TMS Michael Koczak best paper award, and the 1997 Los Alamos National Laboratory director’s post-doctoral fellowship. His research interests are centered at the broad intersection of design, materials processing, process modeling and control.