Friday, June 6, 2014

Human Powered Submarine / Cool RepRap-Printed Prototype

Jacobs School of Engineering undergraduate student Alistair Twombly was demo’ing Sebastion, the UC San Diego human powered submarine last night at the Jacobs School’s Corporate Affiliates Program board meeting. This project is part of the UC San Diego chapter of ASME.

During the course of our conversation, Twombly, who is a second-year aerospace engineering major, showed off the palm-sized prototype of the dolphin-tail propulsion system the team is developing for the next iteration of the human-powered sub. (see photo below)

Overhead view of the prototype of the dolphin-tail propulsion system


The plan is to get the propulsion system designed, built and installed in a human-powered submarine in time for the international submarine races competition in June 2015. He printed his dolphin-tail propulsion prototype using his RepRap 3D printer which he assembled himself.

If you haven’t heard of RepRap, it’s pretty cool…the idea is that it’s a self-replicating manufacturing machine.
Photos of Twombly’s RepRap prusa mendel iteration 2 are below. “The build instructions are all
open source and hosted at 
reprap.org which in general works as a hub for the whole reprap community,” Twombly wrote in an email.

“I can't say it’s the prettiest printer out there, but it works,” he wrote.




1 comment:

  1. Some strategies use melting or softening material to provide the layers. Selective optical device sintering (SLS) and fused deposition modeling (FDM) are the foremost common technologies exploitation this fashion of printing. Another technique of printing is to get liquid materials that are cured with totally different technologies. The foremost common technology exploitation this technique is named stereo-lithography (SLA). Thanks for sharing such kind of nice and wonderful collection
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