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!"

Sand and Magnesium as resources...

[Dilligent]

...sounds like a great choice as resources to use. As Sand is basically silicon and readily available, magnesium is also the 7th most abundant [jlab.org] 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 [reprap.org] 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.

Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia

[Jeng]

I can say bad idea, but I do not think this is a bad idea.

Concrete dust has many of the properties of lunar dust. We know we will have to find a way to build with it if we are going to make a moon-base.

Old technology

[WarlockSquire]

while this is certainly super-sized, this technology has been around for over a decade.
z-corp comes to mind (www.zcorp.com)

I saw them print out a rubber ball from elastic particles and flexible glue that actually bounced.
They kept the cost down early by using HP Deskjet hardware for the printing (just glue instead of ink).

cool stuff, but not new.

Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia

[slimjim8094]

A bit more about moon dust -

It's called regolith and isn't smooth. If you look at 'grit', such as sand or dirt or dust etc on earth, you'll find that it's all rounded by erosion. There is no erosion on the moon, so the 'grit' up there is all sharp.

I think that humans won't have too much trouble with it as far as inhaling goes - it'll get trapped in mucus as well as all the other dust we inhale.

Basically, it's different enough from Earth sand and dust to be interesting, but Earth grit is still abrasive. You probably wouldn't have any more trouble with your lenses than you would on Earth.

Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon? If it was going to wreck our solar panels, lenses, or people, wouldn't we have already found that out?

The summary links to a blog quoting a blog ...

[IMustBeNewHere]

The original story [blueprintmagazine.co.uk] is longer, with more pictures...

Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you're thinking of Asbestos insulation, not fiberglass sheets. Fiberglass is very common.

Re:The summary links to a blog quoting a blog ...

[Anonymous Coward]

And appears to contain links to malware, thank you very much....

Re:what can you do without scaffolding?

[BitZtream]

Slashdot needs a rule preventing the posting of stories about stories.

Or at the very least, fucking preventing blogs about blogs about some story.

When did slashdot become a random blog aggregator instead of news for nerds?

If you get a submission from a user thats a link to a story about some other story, don't fucking post it. Make your own damn submission with the final site in it and stop giving out all the slashvertising and wasting our time.

Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia

[Abcd1234]

I think that humans won't have too much trouble with it as far as inhaling goes - it'll get trapped in mucus as well as all the other dust we inhale.

Funny, you'd think the same thing about airborne silicon, and yet you'd be wrong [wikipedia.org]:

When small silica dust particles are inhaled, they can embed themselves deeply into the tiny alveolar sacs and ducts in the lungs, where oxygen and carbon dioxide gases are exchanged. There, the lungs cannot clear out the dust by mucous or coughing.

Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia

[DerekLyons]

It's called regolith and isn't smooth.

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.)
 

Basically, it's different enough from Earth sand and dust to be interesting, but Earth grit is still abrasive. You probably wouldn't have any more trouble with your lenses than you would on Earth.

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.)
 

Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon? If it was going to wreck our solar panels, lenses, or people, wouldn't we have already found that out?

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.
 

I think that humans won't have too much trouble with it as far as inhaling goes - it'll get trapped in mucus as well as all the other dust we inhale.

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.

Re:first use

[david_thornley]

It's worse than that - in the closing credits, the saber-tooth locks Fred out.

The original you linked to contains a trojan

[electrongunner]

The page you linked to contains the Trojan:JS/Gamburl.E. MSFT Security Essentials just flagged it and removed it from my browser cache.

Re:Structural integrity?

[reverseengineer]

There are several different formulations of magnesium-based cements, so it's hard to say what the properties of this material would be- and concrete is a complex material where small tweaks in composition can make for big alterations in attributes. I found this brochure from D_Shape [d-shape.com] (PDF) that underneath the dramatic vision-pitching gets at more of the specifics. From the description of the material, "The stone is very similar to marble," and the description of what comes out of the nozzles as "a bicomponent liquid/solid inorganic binder," it sounds like a form of magnesium oxychloride, aka Sorel cement. Sorel cement is prepared by mixing solid magnesia (MgO) with magnesium chloride brine. It goes on to mention the possibility of adding "reinforcing fibres selected from the group comprised of glass fibres, carbon fibres, nylon fibres."

Magnesium-based cements can be superior to their calcium silicate (Portland cement-like) counterparts in terms of strength, and they set very quickly, but the traditional issue they have had is that they are more susceptible to water erosion (the cured cement is more water soluble than Portland cement), and so they've been more popular for quick-patch type work rather than large-scale construction. Modern advances in its composition are improving its water resistance, however, and notably, water erosion would not be much of a problem on the moon.