IEEE Future Directions
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We are seeing significant progress in material science, with scientists and researchers becoming able to design a material based on the desired properties. Some of these properties may include sensing and adaptation, change in flexibility and shape. Some of this goes under the name of 4D printing, the possibility to create objects that will change their shape over time (that is the reason for the 3+1 dimension!).
I just run into an example of this progress in material science with the Silq Steelcase, a chair using a specifically designed polymer that self adapt to the person sitting in the chair and to the posture she takes.
What interested me was a sentence by Jame Ludwig, VP of global design and engineering at Steelcase. Steelcase engineers solved the complexity of current office chairs, having some 200 parts, by using carbon fibres and cutting down the number of parts by a factor of 6. The problem was that the cost of manufacturing a carbon fibre chair was way too high to be affordable by the target market. Hence he sent back his engineers to the drawing board asking them to find an alternative material that would have the same/similar characteristics of carbon fibre, in that specific application, and be way cheaper.
In just a few months the engineers managed to create a polymer (its actual composition is a trademark secret…) whose resulting chair manufacturing cost was one quarter of the one required by using carbon fibre.
Is this aspect of designing a material based on the required characteristics that has me hooked up!
Smart materials will be a crucial aspect of Industry 4.0, in my opinion, although I have not seen this aspect addressed when discussing Industry 4.0. And, notice, it is again about software. You need a lot of software to model the material characteristics and to create it first on the drawing board.
More and more manufacturing is about playing with bits leaving the actual “production” of the product as a side effect of the design and modelling. And this part, thanks to 3D printing and flexible robotics can take place anywhere. The knowledge factory of tomorrow will be more and more a software powerhouse, and actual production might get displaced to warehouses and even to retail shops (and for some products it may happen in our homes!).
An interesting perspective indeed.
