Improving 3-D Printing By Copying Nature 128
An anonymous reader writes "Biologist Janine Benyus is excited about the 3-D printer revolution and she thinks it can be improved by modeling natural processes. 'Benyus, who wrote Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature and co-founded the institute Biomimicry 3.8, would like to see a transition in manufacturing—from big, smoke-belching factories to small, clean desktop printers. The key to making it truly sustainable, she said, lies in mimicking how a natural ecosystem functions. "Nature uses life-friendly chemistry, which is nontoxic and water-based, and which does not require high heat," said Benyus. In contrast, most of the products people use today have been forged in industrial-size furnaces, with a plethora of toxic solvents. A potato chip bag may seem like a simple item, but it is actually made up of several thin layers of different materials, one to make it strong, one to make it airtight, and so on.'"
Not all PLA is made from maize (Score:5, Informative)
It's made from sugarbeet, milk waste, and current pilot plants are looking at cellulosic production piggybacking on ethanol research. Only in the US where agricultural subsidies encourage it is it made from maize. That's a political problem, not a biological problem.
Nature Is Exothermic -- Just Slow (Score:5, Informative)
"Nature uses life-friendly chemistry, which is nontoxic and water-based, and which does not require high heat,"
Nature's manufacturing processes are exothermic, just like factory processes. They're just really slow, so the heat difference at any moment is fairly low. Take plants, for example -- they take in solar energy, increase order locally, and produce heat during respiration. The law of increasing entropy requires unordered energy to be released to offset the increases in local order.
The heat produced is not as shockingly different as it seems based on casual observation; the waste heat is just being expelled over a longer period of time. According to Wikipedia, and my incomplete understanding of the entire process, photosynthetic biomass production is at most 32% efficient (see below). I would guess meatware manufacturing is not much more efficient, if at all.
Wikipedia: Photosynthetic Efficiency [wikipedia.org]:
Stated another way:
100% sunlight -> non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving
53% (in the 400-700 nm range) -> 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving
37% (absorbed photon energy) -> 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving
28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyl) -> 32% efficient conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving
9% (collected as sugar) -> 35-40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving
5.4% net leaf efficiency.
Re:Nature uses life friendly.. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, a good part of the chemistry occurs in or around oil based membranes.
And biological toxins are all around us. I am not talking just about toxic fungi, pathogenic bacteria or poisonous animals. The very potato chips she mentions are toxic if eaten uncooked, as well as soya beans and many others. Those compounds prevent the plants from being eaten. So we cook our foods to inactivate toxic compounds (and kill pathogens). There exists an arms race out there in the wild, and she's a biologist, she knows how it works.
Re:Slow (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't have high standards for your 2x4s (and if you're buying what your local home-improvement store sells, you probably don't), it's more like 15-20 years for some fast-growing pine lumber.
</pedantry>
Re:Please quite making asinine statements. (Score:5, Informative)
Chem Eng, Enviro specialty here. Biological processes are sweet because they run at/near SATP (room temp and pressure) and generally use water (cheap, non-toxic) as a solvent. Typical industrial processing techniques use harsh-assed chemicals (safety + environmental risk) and a lot of energy (usually heat). That being said, biological systems are typically inefficient as shit and can't produce the same output / rector volume but are much cheaper. SO if you can create a culture that's particularly suited to what you want it to do (E. Coli is often used) you can recreate an expensive process that involves toxic (read: expensive to dispose of) with a cheap process with a disposal cost that is orders of magnitude lower than the traditional solution.
So yeah, that's why biological processes (low temp, nontoxic materials) are sweet. They cost less.