P.Abishek Jerome, Francis Samruth

Additive manufacturing of Auxetic Materials for Sport Equipments

Through our senior colleagues we came in contact with Dr. Tom Allen and the Manchester Metropolitan University. Due to our immense interest in Material Science and Additive manfacturing we were delighted to get the opportunity to work with the advanced equipment in MMU to synthesize Auxetic structures for Sport safety equipment. The duration of our project was between 18th January and 18th March 2018.

The main objective of our project was to successfully manufacture re-entrant auxetic structures using a Lulzbot 3D printer, which is capable of exhibiting negative poisson ratio and high Impact resistance.

The result we were able to learn was the methodology to successfully control the structure of the auxetic using various settings and document it. This can be further used to build complex auxetic structures useful for the sports Industry.

We had the opportunity to meet people from various departments and cultures and were able to share ideas for the betterment of our project. Since we were given the full wheel on the project we were able to fully understand the nuances of our work which helped us to improve our project management skills tremendously.

We being International students, the funding helped us in and out of the project and made sure that we were able to complete our project successfully. The funding covered our material costs, travel costs, etc.

Finally we were able to explore a new range of possibilites in Material science through this project. We learnt about the future of materials in sports industries and also on how materials play a pivotal role in safety and protection.

After this we will be pursuing our Masters and hopefully land a job in the sporting industry. We wish to thank ISEA for being making this tremendous opportunity a succesful journey.