Manufacturing Engineering podcasts

Ethan Secor discusses additive manufacturing methods for printing electronic circuits onto complex three-dimensional surfaces. The conversation connects material choices, printing techniques and the design of electronics that conform to shaped objects, highlighting the research behind customized functional surfaces.

Rajesh Menon discusses research combining optical systems with nanofabrication. The episode explores holographic lithography and how coordinated advances in light-based methods and fabrication can support new three-dimensional manufacturing technologies.

Taylor Sparks and Andrew Falkowski discuss autonomous materials laboratories with Radical AI co-founder and CEO Joseph Krause. They examine instrument integration and data-access limitations, the MATRIX vision-language model, language-model embeddings for Bayesian optimization, and how to measure the contribution of scientific intuition. Krause also explains the choice to pursue manufacturing alongside discovery, emphasizing production data and process know-how. The episode connects automated experimentation with the practical challenges of developing and scaling new alloys.

Hosted by Taylor Sparks, Andrew Falkowski

Laura Leay interviews MIT’s Carlos Portela about a computational design framework for deformable woven metamaterials. Graphs describe the periodic architecture and how struts interweave at nodes; user-defined helix geometry controls the woven beams. The framework produces files for finite-element analysis and 3D printing, enabling predictions of large-deformation behavior and fabrication of previously inaccessible architectures. The freely available approach connects textile-inspired design with tunable elastic response.

Hosted by Laura Leay

Sophia Chen interviews Matt Dickerson of the Air Force Research Laboratory about manufacturing nanofibrous ceramics with additive methods. The discussion explains how block copolymers direct preceramic polymers into fibers, followed by heating that removes the block polymer and converts the precursor to ceramic. Compared with electrospun mats, printing offers control over component geometry. Ceramic springs illustrate repeated deformation without degrading their mechanical properties, with possible applications in catalysts, batteries and high-temperature components.

Hosted by Sophia Chen

Ralph Bernstein discusses semiconductor chips, miniaturized transistors and the specialized manufacturing behind modern computing. Conversation in Norwegian.