In the end, Rayne Wolf could hardly bear to look at the monitor attached to the microscope she and her labmates had set up in a hangar at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
Wolf and her fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students had spent the past two-plus weeks in the muggy Florida heat finishing final preparations for a series of parabolic test flights to validate their 3D printing technology in a zero-gravity environment.
But the first two flights—roughly 40-minute jaunts comprised of alternating 30-second periods of zero-gravity and 2G conditions (also known as “vomit comets” for their tendency to make passengers sick)—hadn’t gone as planned. The printer’s stages had stubbornly refused to move, leaving the students and their advisor, Industrial and Systems Engineering Assistant Professor Hantang Qin, with one final shot. They spent the week leading up to their third flight troubleshooting any and all potential causes during 12- to 15-hour days.
“A lot rides on these experiments,” says Wolf, a PhD student from Potosi, Wisconsin, and one of the team leads on the NASA-funded project.
The group’s perseverance paid off: Qin’s lab made history in March 2024 by successfully 3D printing RAM device units in zero gravity—the first time it’s been done.
Read more here: https://engineering.wisc.edu/news/uw-madison-engineers-make-3d-printing-breakthrough-in-race-to-in-space-manufacturing/