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3-D Printer Creates Buildings From Dust and Glue
An anonymous reader writes "D-Shape, an innovative new 3-D printer, builds solid structures like sculptures, furniture, even buildings from the ground up. The device relies on sand and magnesium glue to actually build structures layer by layer from solid stone. The designer, Enrico Dini, is even talking with various organizations about making the printer compatible with moon dust, paving the way for an instant moonbase!"
...sounds like a great choice as resources to use. As Sand is basically silicon and readily available, magnesium is also the 7th most abundant in th earths crust. It seems like this thing could go a long way towards very cheap mass production of all sorts of solid things very cheaply. There is also the RepRap project but they use plastics which I'm afraid are quite expensive as resource, although they kind of target a different area. I'm excited by this, I've been following these ideas for a while and it seems to be going somewhere, I guess we're getting closer to general purpose building machines.
Can you say bad Idea?
Fiberglass particulate is just as nasty and it's in your home right now! *ominous look upwards* Oh, wait... it's sealed behind a wall. Nevermind. Same principle apples to "space dust". Build the structure, then coat the insides or attach walls to make it a happy fun place for all.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I know zilch about materials science, but I have to wonder how these structures would hold up as they get large. Will they be like concrete, or like sandstone? or like particle board...
Maybe it prints money too?
meep
what do you mean? a thousand yards long for those endless running scenes, Or where a wife can lock her husband out but a raptor or sabre-tooth tiger can come in through any window?
The "scaffolding" is sand that hasn't been sprayed with glue. Imagine making a simple dome. You lay down a layer of sand. You glue the perimeter. The center stays unglued. Let the glue set, lay down another layer of sand, glue the perimeter. Repeat, making the perimeter smaller each time. The walls are supported by the unglued sand in the middle. When you close the top, you open the side, remove the unglued sand, and you have a dome.
This is how most of the stereolitho machines work now, save they use a support material that can be removed with a solvent that doesn't dissolve the plastic used for the parts you want to keep.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I always thought that we need robots to build a moonbase before we bother sending people up there again. Here's one robot that might help get the job done. Then again, it seems like a major piece of hardware that will be difficult to transport. But the idea of making stone from dust is a good one. Maybe we should half-inflate a giant balloon so its top is dome-shaped, cover it with layers of moon dirt which would be hardened with this magnesium fixative. Once the stone is thick enough, the dome will be self-supporting and a good radiation shield. The whole process might be done by a single remote-controlled backhoe with a spray-nozzle. This is the kind of cool shit that NASA should be doing.
The original story is longer, with more pictures...
Regolith is the geological name for for dust covered Lunar surface. Dust is the name for the dust. (Kinda like a beach is made up of sand.)
Earth grit, which isn't exactly common outside of sandy or windblown areas, is abrasive. Earth dust, which like Lunar dust is ubiquitous, isn't. So to some extent you're comparing apples (ubiquitous non abrasive Earth dust) to oranges (ubiquitous abrasive Lunar dust.)
We have already found out that in the very short term (think hours) Lunar dust is highly damaging to moving parts. much more so than terrestrial dust. (It even damages things that you wouldn't normally think of as a moving part - like folds in clothing, or between the fingers of gloves.) We don't really have enough experience with long terms operations in Lunar dust, especially in and around operations that will disturb the dust.
But it's pretty clear that the dust is going to be a major problem for equipment like the machine described in TFA, as well as for mining machines associated with recovering lunar water.
Yeah, that's why we make people like miners, metal workers, woodworkers, and others who work around artificially produced (and thus still sharp) dust wear personal protective equipment.