Solar-Powered 3D Printer that Prints Glass from Sand

http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a-solar-powered-3d-printer-that-prints-glass-from-sand-and-a-sun-powered-laser-cutter/

by seven • 15 years ago

154 22 15 years ago

thisiscolossal.com

tzury2• 15 years ago

That is all nice, amazing and innovative.

Yet I think it is time to stop calling devices which create something and connected to a PC via USB a "Printer".

Printer, print a material which you read. Anything else, is a robot which does X or Y.

blhack• 15 years ago

Do you consider it a printer if it's photos? A friend of mine owns a print shop that does very large scale advertising photos (like, building sized stuff). Should I inform his industry that they should stop referring to themselves as "printers" because they're not producing text?

russell• 15 years ago

I think of printers as devices which produce hard copy 2-dimensional images. Star Trek coined "replicators". I think it fits pretty well even if the current versions are only 1.x of a pretty big n. "Robots" better fits the advanced articulated milling machines.

kragen5• 15 years ago

I think "printer" evokes more illuminating associations than "robot". A "printer" is something where you feed in bits and get out a physical product, which has largely replaced mass production (the very oldest kind of mass production!) with one-off custom production, in the particular domain where it's applicable. A "robot" is C-3PO.

regularfry2• 15 years ago

> the very oldest kind of mass production

Actually, it's not. In ancient Egypt, bricks for house-building were mass-produced by casting mud in reusable moulds. That's the oldest example of mass-production I know of, but it would't surprise me if there were others of a similar vintage.

tzury2• 15 years ago

from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing

    Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with 
    ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a 
    large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing 
    and transaction printing.

So perhaps, printer is a device which does printing.

pittsburgh2• 15 years ago

I'm running a startup that 3D prints custom eyewear. When I explain 3D printing to somebody who isn't familiar with it, I usually show them this video of a wrench being made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW0NZgcq9yA

Goodbye, wrench video. I'm going to start showing everybody Markus Kayser's SunCutter instead. Not only is it cooler, but I actually think the video of him printing the bowl in the desert helps you see what's happening more clearly.

His SunCutter is a demonstration of SLS (selective laser sintering) which traditionally uses a laser (or in the above example, focused sun beams) to fuse small particles together.

We're using SLA (Stereolithography) to print the glasses, which uses a UV laser to cure a liquid resin which turns it into a solid. For a good demonstration of SLA in action, check out this video of one of the printers we use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTWFWh1x-yo&t=1m46s

Finally, some shameless self-promotion... we're about to launch the private beta for our startup and we're actively seeking beta testers to kick the tires on our eyewear-designing software. If you're interested you can sign up at http://www.oyoglasses.com

fishtastic• 15 years ago

That was a great use of a huge magnifying glass. If he can somehow mass produce this, it would bring the cost of making planting pots to almost nothing.

One problem with this design is that the light would deflect off the center particle and melt other sand around it. In the video, pretty much everything in 1cm radius gets melted. Unless he can somehow make it print in greater details, I can't think of a better use for this other than producing planting pots.

Swannie• 15 years ago

Combined with hand finishing, lathe finishing, 4 or 5 axis CNC milling, or any combination of the above - and there are a lot more uses.

pyrhho• 15 years ago

Scale it up and build a solid stone building? Anything else medium to large and stone, really. Giant statues?

cowkingdeluxe• 15 years ago

I'm curious about this as well. I wonder how effective it would be at building a strong home cheaply.

phlux• 15 years ago

GLegos. Glass LEGO made from sand and printed out.

The machine needs to be scaled and cheapened - but it MUST be made to make bricks - over time, the bricks will be refined and they will be available for sale in the Organic or Fair Trade aisle of Home Depot.

A smaller version shall be made and refined to allow girls in west africa to make beads and cups and such.

primitur• 15 years ago

>That was a great use of a huge magnifying glass. If he can somehow mass produce this, it would bring the cost of making planting pots to almost nothing.

This technology could be used to make water sills and collectors in the desert. If you spend a week out there making water collectors, a couple weeks later you may find you have enough water for a village or two.

Glass-forming in the desert could be the basis of an extraordinary micro-permaculture effort to build oases and gardens in otherwise impossibly hostile environments.

This, plus a lot of water harvesting, could solve a lot of very difficult problems.

If SunCutters can be made to make more SunCutters, and if templates for the SunCutter can be easily made, then I say once this tech is available to the desert masses, it could very much revolutionize restoration of these difficult lands.

regularfry2• 15 years ago

Even if all it could do was make plant pots, being able to print a pot design which could grow a given crop while using half the water of open irrigation would be huge. That's well within the range of sub-irrigation systems, and the beauty of 3d printing is that prototyping and experimenting with new designs is trivial once the system is set up.

kragen5• 15 years ago

Imaging optics are limited in how small a spot they can make from the sun, unless you occlude part of the sun. I suspect the 1cm radius comes from that, not from light spreading through the sand. (If it's the latter, you could add a small amount of crushed charcoal to solve the problem.)

I think there are lots of uses for coarse-scale 3-D printing of fused quartz. (Did he mix in any lime to lower the melting point, or is that more or less pure quartz sand?) Furniture, coarse parts of machinery, sculpture, buildings, and the like.

pittsburgh2• 15 years ago

This seems like a great way to build structures on the Moon.

Imagine if we landed robots on the Moon to gather up moon dust into piles, and then satellites orbiting the moon could capture sunlight and direct that energy in the form of laser beams pointed at the moon dust. The robots would periodically brush away the excess dust, or add more to the pile.

This idea might sound far fetched, but back in 2005 some guy actually sintered moon dust in a microwave oven. ( http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/09... ) This, combined with the op's article form a good proof of concept for 3D printed lunar homes.

Solar-Powered 3D Printer that Prints Glass from Sand

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