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A Solar-Powered 3D Printer Prints Glass From Sand

Posted by Unknown on from the print-your-dishes-off-the-grid dept.

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."

13 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fonts by parkrrrr · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, it only does suns serif.

  2. Re:Not impressed by codepunk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But it still works much better than the one that you built.

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  3. Annealing? by istartedi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Annealing? by smellsofbikes · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      I was a glassblower and glass bead artist for a while. Careful cooling is pretty essential for lime glass, which is what we mostly use. It's less important for borosilicates like Pyrex, which is why glass casserole dishes can survive being put onto 200C metal racks in the oven, and it's even less important for fused quartz that's straight silicon dioxide. You can stick a pyrex rod that's less than a centimeter in diameter straight into an oxypropane flame without it splitting or snapping, and I believe you can do the same with a 3 or 4 cm quartz rod. Obviously this stuff isn't pure silicon dioxide, but it's closer to SiO2 than it is to lime glass.

      Incremental deposition probably won't solve the annealing problem, but it'll change it: instead of having strain across big areas, you'll have little bits of strain distributed between each layer of glass that's put on so you're liable to get a lot of small cracks through the porous material, rather than one big catastrophic crack. However, all those little cracks generally tend to grow, but that may be somewhat helped by it being an amorphous, impure material: it's harder for cracks to run in long straight lines in crappy heterogenous stuff.

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  4. Re:Fonts by RoverDaddy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unfortunately it only does Cosmic Sands.

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  5. Re:Not impressed by Afforess · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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  6. Re:de-desertification by black+soap · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think it is ever a good idea to "let a swarm of robots loose."

  7. OK, read TFA and watch TFV by istartedi · · Score: 3, Informative

    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"?
  8. Re:Not impressed by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Funny

    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."

  9. Re:What would be really cool by pnot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Can he build houses with that printer? by nschubach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

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  11. Skip the commercial blog... by fotbr · · Score: 4, Informative

    Original source is here: http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/

  12. Re:Not impressed by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)