Programmable Carbon Fiber

Team: Skylar Tibbits, Athina Papadopoulou, Sulaiman Alothman, Jaskirat Randhawa, Dimitris Mairopoulos

This project explores large-scale Programmable Carbon Fiber produced on a 4’x2’ multi-material FDM. After printing, the carbon fiber is light-activated to trigger reversible shape transformation from a flat sheet to an spiral structure. The Programmable Carbon Fiber technology has been developed in collaboration with Carbitex as an extension of their existing fully-cured flexible carbon fiber technology, CX6.

The large-format multi-material FMD was custom developed with Shopbot as a modular and easily customizable printer for large-format 2D and 3D printed structures.

Exhibited at the BSA Space, Boston MA June 2015: Bigger than a Breadbox, Smaller than a Building