Project Reviews for two papers

Review Guidelines
1. Stated goals and solution. What problem are the authors trying to solve?
2. Cool or significant ideas. What is new here? What are the main contributions of the
paper?
3. Fallacies and blind spots. Did the authors make any assumptions or disregard any issues
that make their approach less appealing?
4. New ideas and connections to other work. How could the paper be extended? How could
some of the flaws of paper be corrected or avoided?

Data-Driven Bending Elasticity Design by Shell Thickness

As the 3D printing is applied on much more aspects of scientific research than before, more
and more problems and challenges are gradually arising from the real demands for some
materials or structures. In fact, as we know, there are so many limitations in the application of
3D printing. For example, we have to think over what kind of material could be used for the
printing or if the structure we want could be printed out without any impacts from some
forces before we decide to adopt this tool in our research. So generally based on my own
experience of using 3D printing in robot design and motion planning, we tend to design some
solid structure or simple cube for our model if we want to print it out, and when we check if
there would be any problems during printing, we have to delete some small attachments or
minor parts, and some complex curve surface because some very serious deformation will
come out during the printing so that the whole model or all materials used would be wasted. I
suppose that is why 3D printing has been a very hot research and application topic for a long
time but not been widely used in actual manufacturing, not to mention fabricating deformable
objects, like customized toys, gadgets an soft robotics, as the paper said.

Also for now, there is still much room for our discussion and progress in this field. And even
if we only make a little improvement on the previous basis, it can bring up a lot of change for
the industry and print more things we image or design. Eventually, the revolution of
manufacturing might come in our age and “printing everything” could be realized.

After reading and knowing more details about the excellent ideas presented in the paper, I
was deeply inspired and impressed by how wonderful their approaches are in solving the
demanding problems we are encountering. Generally our way of thinking is relatively simple
and we are almost trapped by our old cognition, but the author gives us a new perspective on
those challenges. First cool idea is that we can preprocess the diameters and other parameters
of the hollow shape in the condition that we do not have to change the appearance of the
design based on the thickness of the CAD model and the thickness function can produce a
continuous distribution of thickness so as to optimize the load and force distribution in the
material. In that way, 3D printing could be applied on much complicated shape, even with
elastic material, which will open a door for fabricating deformable objects.

In this paper, the author provide several examples to verify the feasibility of the approach and
get very good results and make nonuniformly hollowed model design and printing more
feasible in reality. However, as we all know in our past experience of 3D printing, during the
printing process, the material could be very hot and especially the circle or curve surface
might not be fixed as we design, that is to say, it might deform when it cools down. So it is
perfect when we use our framework or function to output a perfect model for 3D printing,
considering bending behaviors, elasticity of material and load distribution, but we also need
make sure it is still good after cooling down.

Actually many decent printing samples are presented in this paper, which is very inspiring,
especially the hand model using new material. I am thinking if the hand model could be
designed as hollowed shape, perhaps we can add skeleton and joints inside, even minor servo
motors, then it can be used as the hands of bionic robot with remote control. In a nutshell, if
what is presented in the paper could be realized completely, that will give us much
imagination of the future.
 Approaching the Ideal Elastic Limit in Silicon Nanowires

Nanoelectronics technology has been more and more significant in our chip design and
manufacturing, which are widely used in our most electronic devices. And as we are living in
an age of information, we can barely survive without internet or relevant technology. Silicon
nanowires are playing a crucial role in semiconductor industry, which consists of cutting-
edge technologies and is of high profit. Another important truth is that nanowires have
promising applications in lithium ion batteries, that is exciting and inspiring. I suppose most
of us are very familiar with lithium ion batteries that is almost used everywhere in portable
electronics and electric vehicles nowadays and it is indeed a great invention and even bring
the revolution of information age for us, but maybe we have no idea that it was created and
developed by Akira Yoshino in 1985 and its application was based on the research conducted
during 1970s. So basically there have not been much progress in Lithium-ion battery
technology for almost half century so far, such as the volume of the battery in our mobile
phone which takes up at least one third of the available space inside our phone. Not hard to
understand, it could be the limitation for the development of our electronic devices because
of weak battery life and lack of room for other important hardware. That is why I believe
even a little progress or new findings about silicon nanowires or LIB are meaningful and
maybe have a great potential of making great difference in our life.

In this paper, I was impressed by the theoretical elastic limit of silicon if we can truly realize
it in our lab and apply it into relevant promising industries. Surely the deep super strength or
elasticity are contributed by their original, scarce, nano-sized single crystal structure and
atomic smooth surface in some sense, which determines it has the potential to reach the limit.
However, how to reach the limit and the details of the approach are the crucial technology.
What is disappointing is that the limit of the material has to be achieved in a limited
environment, like absolute 0 temperature, that restricted the development of the application to
much degree. If that could be realized and thermally activated defect processes are still
possible at room temperature, it will make a great pace in this industry.

From the results presented in the paper, we know that VLS-grown single-crystal Si nanowires
further showed a flat fracture surface with no visible indication of plastic deformation near
the fracture area. And at the same time, the researcher also consider the large plastic strains in
silicon nanowires due to electron beam effects and it is great to see the limit could be
achieved without other distribution in loading and unloading conditions. The inspiring results
make us think if that is possible in other defect scarce semiconductor nanowires which takes
advantage of the drastically changed electronic and optical properties under ultra-large lattice
strains. We cannot help imaging what are going to happen especially in flexible electronics
and bio-nano integrated systems. Although the results have been recognized and somehow
proved, we have to acknowledge that there are many core factors impacting the bending
behaviors in the loading-unloading experiments that determine our judgement on the
elasticity limit of the nanowires. A interesting thing is that we tend to analyze the behaviors
according to the data or parameters but actually we can also induct much truth from some
visual phenomenon directly which inspire us to do further research on the phenomenon.