Funded by the DoD for both military and educational purposes, the project involved building integrated and accessible CAD/CAM toolchains as well as a plate and tube cutting machine that leveraged maturing fiber laser sources. I was responsible for electromechanical design in consultation with an experienced laser cutter equipment designer. I also became familiar with gaussian optics and designed a laser head with off the shelf elements based on analytical models and reference designs. The technology was spun out as a dedicated company, 3D Fab Light.

Fablight

When the Ebola outbreak of 2014 occurred, the DoD supplied emergency funds to develop equipment and methods to help combat the spread of the disease. I led a small team to prototype inflatable tent structures which would provide temporary living spaces for infected individuals in camps in affected regions. This evolved into a design an fabrication platform where roll-fed sheets of PE would be selectively laser welded together with a custom CO2 laser platform. We also developed a prototype CAD/CAM system that allowed caregivers to modularly design and configure different structure and feature combinations to be built on demand. We built a prototype manufacturing cell that could be deployed in region quickly.

Carecube B

Carecube A

Carecube C

Carecube D

Carecube E

Carecube F

We applied the laser welding techniques and equipment developed during the containment chamber initiative to create heat exchangers that enable high surface area and low flow velocities in pursuit of better overall efficiency and lower manufacturing costs. The work resulted in a granted patent.

HX1

HX2

Many of the ongoing projects at Otherlab at the time involved pneumatic robotics. One challenge in all of these programs was the lack of availability of cost and space effective proportional control valves. The team has previously identified that a purpose-built high speed PWM controlled butterfly valve would potentially serve this need. I analytically modeled and architected a custom voice coil-based valve and associated linkage.

Valve1

Valve2

Valve3

Specialized wanted to develop a helmet that leveraged collapsing rigid structures instead of traditional expanded foam methods. A similar approach using a matrix of consolidated and collapsing tube structures had recently been deployed in the market. After researching regulatory and functional requirements of helmets I first developed an analytical model to size different shell elements required to achieve functional parity, and then developed an approach to create a composite structure based on a series of folding and welded shell structures made from thermo-formed sheets. Other team members then created software to computationally design different shell patterns and associated folding sheets based on overall form factor goals and structural requirements. I built custom equipment to create the thermoformed shell structures and developed an approach for prototyping composite helmets for testing.

Helmet 1

Helmet 2