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A Solar-Powered 3D Printer Prints Glass From Sand
Tx-0 writes in with a story in Colossal Art & Design. From the article: "Industrial designer and tinkerer Markus Kayser spent the better part of a year building and experimenting with two fantastic devices that harness the sun's power in some of the world's harshest climates. The first he calls a Sun Cutter, a low-tech light cutter that uses a large ball lens to focus the sun's rays onto a surface that's moved by a cam-guided system. ... Next, Kayser began to examine the process of 3D printing. Merging two of the deserts most abundant resources, nearly unlimited quantities of sand and sun, he created the Solar Sinter, a device that melts sand to create 3D objects out of glass."
But can it do sans serif?
But it still works much better than the one that you built.
Got Code?
I am not impressed, It is just a machine that burns oil.
I am not impressed, It is just a big wheel that turns in the river.
I am not impressed, It is just a circuit that performs calculations.
I've got a passing interest in glasswork, and one of the things I learned is that it's more complicated than "melt into mold, let it cool". Glass has to go through a carefully controlled cool-down period so that the molecular structure will set up properly. Otherwise, the resulting object is far more brittle than it should be. If not done properly you can have cracks form during the cooling phase, ruining the object.
Does the incremental deposition solve the annealing problem? Being able to make glass objects without having to carefully control the cool-down would be very nice.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
One must wonder if you really even RTFA, or are just that dense. The 3-d printer using sand and the sun uses widely available resources, in a relatively short time span, to create complex objects, with little/no waste or pollution of any kind. (Exempting the manufacturing of the printer and solar panels themselves). I have not heard of any such similar achievements. The process itself is easy to oversee, (unskilled labor) and seems like it could be scaled up for larger production easily. This process could possibly be used to help start manufacturing on other words, with Mars being mostly sand. What about this achievement is unimpressive, other than your reading comprehension?
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Sadly, my first thought was "pyramids and monuments." Houses might be more beneficial to society.
And what exactly do you suppose would happen if you removed all the sand? You'd still have a desert, just without sand.
It's hard to tell from the pictures exactly how porous that stuff is(it certainly looks rather rough; but it might be fully vitrified in the center with just a cosmetic crust of sand clinging to it); but, in principle, there certainly doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with using thermally-fused-whatever-mineral-dust-is-local-there as a construction material...
The engineering might well get a bit hairy, especially for the moon, though... Temperatures high enough to sinter the stuff, much less to vitrify it enough to be gas tight, would probably give you a nontrivial amount of evaporation/sublimation in a vacuum(after all, you'd basically be unintentionally running a gigantic vacuum sputtering operation right above your vitrification attempt...)
An unintentional sputtered film of mixed whatever-is-in-lunar-regolith would probably be lousy for lenses and mirrors, and, as it would likely crack into fragments of razor-sharp flintlike material if mechanically disturbed, potentially be murder on robots and astronauts. I'm sure people could figure out ways to at least mitigate the problem; but it wouldn't just be a magic sun+sand=unlimited building scenario.
I don't think it is ever a good idea to "let a swarm of robots loose."
It's sintering, and it looks like you end up with lots of little pits and stuff in the finished work. It's also probably a glass-sand aggregate of sorts. They didn't show close-ups of the objects, or any attempt to "finish" them. They might be strong when finished, but not clear.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Contrary to popular belief, the desert TEEMS with life. Why would you want to eradicate an entire ecosystem?
Good-bye
What good is an eco-system if we can't exploit it?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I couldn't watch the video (slashdotted?) but the picture of the object he made looks like a proof-of-concept for solar sintering, not a finely-manufactured object that meets any kind of standard for quality.
Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool machine, but it's more "wow" value right now than something you'd want to buy.
Bob the Super Hamste's great great grandfather once said to the Wright Brothers: "It's not that impressive. It's just a motorized bike that doesn't need to be on the ground."
You'd arguably have something that made the previous desert look like a verdant paradise... Deserts aren't exactly the world's lushest biomes; but they beat the hell out of an apocalyptic sun-baked glass/sand aggregate layer, which would likely take decades of weathering to support much more than lichens and microbes even if the climate suddenly became moist and temperate...
I, for one, welcome our new self replicating, desert dwelling overlords.
I8-D
You could place a long arm on it with one end anchored to the ground and use wheels on the machine to keep it facing the sun. Let it build arches while it tracks the sun across the sand. You could have the machine focus the sun with an oscillator to increase the thickness. The hard part would be supplying sand to melt when it got higher up. I guess some sort of screw elevator would work for that while providing a ramp for the wheel to travel. Of course, one arch would take several days with that method.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Set a bunch of these loose in the Sahara printing out solar panels.
The Sahara Solar Breeder Foundation is aiming at something rather similar: "Large scale/low cost production of solar-grade silicon from desert sand," on a truly impressive scale. It remains to be seen whether they can find the money and political will to get it on track, though.
It looks to me like you could build a 1-piece house with nothing but a fresnel lens good enough to sinter sand. Most of the complexity here is the computerized moving table to enable computer-aided design, and the sun tracker - which are very cool, but limit the size of the item constructed, and require solar cells and a computer. With nothing but the lens, you could still melt yourself a nice crude house, or a basin to hold or collect water, or an adobe oven. In practice I suppose you'd at least want a jig to hold the lens to keep the arms from getting too tired :)
While your friendly local scientific/industrial materials supplier can hook you up with fancy glass designed not to, the mixture of low-purity glass and embedded mineral bits that this thing is putting out will almost certainly eat pretty much all the UV and much of the visible light. The cancer risk would be essentially nonexistent.
You could create a machine that has a consistent speed based on a variable input (like a water wheel/windmill/steam/Stirling engine [you got the sun already...]) by using centrifugal governors and a conical gear. With enough machinery it could operate almost entirely without solar panels and create repetitive simple shapes like bricks for the actual building. Doing something more complex though and you'll want some programmable mechanism like a computer.
I even wonder if you couldn't set up a mechanical sun tracker simply based on the heat it provides (ie, the sun moves over a plate which expands closing a circuit/friction plate that pushes itself out of the sun, cooling and opening back up.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Original source is here: http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/
Right. First-generation design doesn't do everything, film at 11.
It's a proof of concept chief. The first cars didn't have 4-5 star crash safety ratings while able to carry you at 80mph while achieving 40mpg (which my wife's Camry Hybrid does)
Its a computer assisted machining using a camera as input and a set of camber arms for positioning. Did I miss any other use of the "cam" that could apply?
Yes.
And in an ironic twist, it can also make baseballs.
Ball lenses are handy things, and can be dangerous in direct sunlight - especially larger ones.
For most materials, like glass, their focal lengths generally extend away from their surface a distance less than their radius, and approach the surface as the wavelength extends into the infrarad, which means if you carry an uncovered glass sphere around on the beach or in the desert, you will burn your hand or set fire to your glove.
I learned this secondhand one day, at a beach gathering of Tolkien society geeks. One of them had taken to carrying around a 4" glass sphere she had found somewhere, calling it her "palantir." As the sun rose, she yelped and threw the thing to the ground. "It burned me!" she cried.
I had many times coupled fibers using ball lenses so I knew immediately what had happened. But I said "You know what that means, don't you? Sauron is watching you."
She wouldn't touch the thing again.
Also, speaking of ball lenses... you can use your head as a ball lens to extend the range of your car's wireless entry key fob. If you find yourself just out of range of your keys, simply put the transmitter about an inch behind your head, directly *opposite* the car. Your head is mostly transparent to the RF, but has a slightly different index of refraction from air/vaccum, thus acts as a lens. And since your head is approximately spherical, it works well enough to make a practical convergent lens.
I can see the fnords!
Oh, this is just the use of the word "unlimited" in the cellular carrier sense...
as in, "unlimited data" == 2GB.
Simple.
That is a great idea; sharks are notoriously scarce in the desert.
He who lives in a glass house shouldn't throw rocks - or live on a world whose lack of atmosphere means micrometeorites are both deadly and common.
Not really sure about practicality of using sun as blow torch to fuse materials together in "Mars", but i'm pretty sure it's useful to convert heat as stored energy rather than chemical via photovoltaics. For instance, water. Mars supposedly have water. What if, high temperature/pressured water splitting using focus ray into water chamber to gain hydrogen as stored energy and oxygen to sustain life? I think, in foreign environment like Mars, you would want something "low tech" enough so that maintenance is kept at minimal and production and operational cost is low enough to make it reality. Also Mars has plenty of carbon dioxide. Instead of drinking Mars' water or your own piss (filtration is a huge problem), you can use hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make water using sabatier process. Hell, even byproduct can be used to make even more water and carbon extra by using heat which is plenty.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Actually, many commercial 3D printers make very polished final products. In some cases these prototypes may actually be of higher quality and more durable than the final mass produced version.
The problem is that the unit price scales very poorly once you scale up from making five to test to five million to sell.
Now, it's entirely possible that given enough R&D and experiments 3D printers can be developed where the higher cost of production is more than offset by the lack of shipping and the customizability of the final product. Ten years from now our purchase decisions could very well boil down to "cheap and generic from China" or "customized and immediate from the local shop"