So we’ve printed the pressure plates on the SLA printer at the Chair for Energy Technology. The next step will be somewhat more difficult: milling the conductor plates, i.e. the flowfield and open electrode.
For this, Leander reached out to his friend Livia who joined us today for our OFC meeting. Livia is a PhD student at the Chair of Manufacturing Technology. She also leads the additive manufacturing laboratory (3D-FabLab) Lothar. There, the chair offers students at the University of Duisburg-Essen a quite impressive range of additive manufacturing technology free of charge. Besides a variety of 3D printers, the FabLab has a CNC milling machine – exactly what we need to mill the conductor plates. So the whole group walked over to the FabLab where we meet Frauke, who works there as a student assistant.
We handed her a set of cutters that Leander had ordered and were confident that the FabLab team would simply mill the panels in the next few days. We had no idea how unexpectedly complicated this endeavor would turn out to be…
