3-D Printer Creates Buildings From Dust and Glue 139
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!"
first use (Score:3, Insightful)
I want a Fred Flintstone house.
Re:first use (Score:4, Funny)
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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?
It isn't actually long, it has torus-shaped corridors. That's why the background keeps repeating.
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It's worse than that - in the closing credits, the saber-tooth locks Fred out.
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Okay, how long before the High-Capacity Building Cartridges are available? And will they only come 1/10th full? Perhaps the InkJet Manufacturer's have a new customer base to fleece... One slightly filled cartridge per color = PROFIT!
"Magnesium glue"? (Score:2)
n/t
I completely agree (Score:2)
n/t
I, for one... (Score:3, Funny)
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I, for one, say "neato!".
Do you, really? I remain unconvinced. For all I know you could be one of those people who just says that they say "neato!"
Sand and Magnesium as resources... (Score:5, Informative)
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Shrug, this isn't new.
The Alterans (Ancients, the gate builders) left god knows how many stone structures around the universe and thousands in our galaxy alone that have survived 10 million years since they left.
It makes sense that they would do something like this rather than lay massive stone blocks to build those buildings.
Not about the money (Score:2)
It's not really about the money right now, it's about finding something that works. Reprap and similar projects are mostly just trying to find materials that can be put down at high res, and will hold form even when "painting" curves etc. that have little support underneath. This would let people essentially build any object they can model in a 3d program. Otherwise, you're limited to fairly basic solid blocks and things you print, but then cut or work into smaller shapes.
If they can connect it to my office photocopier... (Score:2, Funny)
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Dust is cheap, why scale down?
Structural integrity? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I can't see how this would be useful to build buildings with. How is this an advantage over bolting together a few sections of tubular forms for the columns and tossing in some rebar and concrete? Also, you'd still have to build support for the floors just like you would with traditional concrete. Not to mention having to haul and assemble a building-sized printer at the construction site.
Seems like it would be more useful for smaller, more complex items, rather than general construction.
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One of the articles mentions that the guy actually plans to print his pavilion in parts and take the parts on-site to as
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Maybe like a hornets’ nest.
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Yea, it would have been great to have list some of it's properties, hardness, strength, weight, and actual time.
I don't know what the compression and tension strength is to their stone, but I wouldn't want to live in one that wasn't reinforced. Reinforced concrete is whats used for building. Reinforced with steel or iron. Concrete is week with tension, thus you want materials strong in tension, and is thermal compatible. You wont see structures built with out it for a reason. Watch the next time they buil
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Yea, it would have been great to have list some of it's properties, hardness, strength, weight, and actual time.
I don't know what the compression and tension strength is to their stone, but I wouldn't want to live in one that wasn't reinforced. Reinforced concrete is whats used for building. Reinforced with steel or iron. Concrete is week with tension, thus you want materials strong in tension, and is thermal compatible. You wont see structures built with out it for a reason. Watch the next time they build a concrete bridge, heck even most driveways have rebar in it.
Keep in mind that you'd be building on the moon, where the gravitational pull is 1/6 that of earth. That will relax the structural-strength thresholds considerably. However, moonquakes might still be an issue.
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He's paying for it? (Score:2)
The designer, Enrico Dini, is even talking with various organizations about making the printer compatible with moon dust, paying the way for an instant moonbase!"
He's paying for it? Is Mr. Dini some sort of James Bond villain? (I think it could of meant paving the way.)
Re:He's paying for it? (Score:4, Funny)
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Sounds to me what they are saying is that he is talking to different organizations that may help pay the way for his invention to make a moon-base.
It was worded oddly.
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You have an extra colon and a misplaced closing parenthesis.
Are plans available? (Score:2)
Otherwise the reprap is already better.
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The reprap is better at printing small items in expensive plastic. The D-Shape is better at printing large items in cheap stone.
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The reprap you can actually have, this is another thing you can't have. No matter how nice, if you can't get one it is useless.
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Why can't you have this? It's real. It exists. If I had enough money, I could buy a reprap. If I had enough money, I could also buy the D-Shape.
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You can make a reprap yourself. This product not ever going to be cheap enough for you or me. Might as well get excited about GM buying new transfer presses.
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I might buy a house built with this thing, though. That would be pretty cool. I know the reprap is 'better' in that it is a home hobbyist device, and I could build it. But the D-Shape is better in that it can print a frigen' house! I'm sorry, but that is pretty awesome.
I'm never going to be able to afford my own LHC, either, but I still like to read about it.
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Ok true, I just love the idea of being able to print usable things. Then everyone really could own the means of production, like we already do when it comes to software.
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Except for the fact that both these systems can only print solid, unjointed, non-flexible objects with a uniform consistency. And the reprap can only make items out of a completely uneconomical material, very, very slowly.
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I am sure this machine is also no speed demon.
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Did you look at it? It's HUGE. Like, orders of magnitude larger than a reprap. Bigger print heads mean faster printing.
Old technology (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Alright, build it already! (Score:4, Interesting)
Mmmmh... non-durable glue! (Score:2)
Wanna bet that those building will start to fall apart just when you realize you got a deadly disease from sniffing glue and breathing dust all the time? ;)
The summary links to a blog quoting a blog ... (Score:5, Informative)
The original story [blueprintmagazine.co.uk] is longer, with more pictures...
The original you linked to contains a trojan (Score:2, Informative)
Paving the way ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not paying, PAVING.
God do you people even think about what you're typing or saying when you use phrases like this? Did it ever once occur to you to think about what you're saying and how much sense it makes?
It's The End Of The World As We Know It (Score:2, Insightful)
Get to the choppah! Naow!!
I created buildings from dust and glue (Score:2)
Of course, I was six at the time, and the buildings were only suitable for ants, grasshoppers and spider and snails. Admittedly I also had significant compatibility and upgrade problems which were quickly fixed with a "light spanking" patch.
Something similar has been done already (Score:2)
Here:
http://www.contourcrafting.org/ [contourcrafting.org]
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Yah, "1/3 the price of Portland Cement"... if there was a substance that was cheaper than concrete and nearly as strong it would already be in wide use in construction.
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OK, smart-aleck, it would be widely involved in court cases to allow it to be used in construction.
Building companies LOVE to save money.
Beyond 2000 comes to life (Score:2)
Is this step 1 to that?
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Yes, but is it a solution to the problem of people replying to junk posts to get higher page placement? Putting things in context is a highly efficient organizational skill.
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The scene: your 3-D fax machine mysteriously starts churning out an object late at night.
*bzzt* *bzzt* *bzzt*
*beep*
"buy discount \/1@Gr/-\ and your love member will be THIS BIG!"
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Yes, but is it a solution to the problem of people replying to junk posts to get higher page placement? Putting things in context is a highly efficient organizational skill.
No, a solution to that problem would be allowing readers to collapse threads that wend outside the topic they want to read — squelching uncalled for political or religious flamewars so that you can get back to the subject that interests you which would otherwise be several miles down the page.
That, or sorting the replies to any article or post based on score (and aggregate score of sub-replies) so that replying to the article is not doomed to be buried under the replies to chronologically-advantaged f
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Beyond 2000? How about a Star Trek replicator?
Has anyone thought about the social implications? A Star Trek replicator would make real, concrete objects as easy to duplicate as intellectual property is now. We'll be in for a fantastic social upheaval.
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Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age discusses this to some extent
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That's only true for a replicator that is unlimited. If the replicator had imperfections, what you say is nonsense.
Maybe cost of energy would be the defining criterium for the cost of goods (that would be about the same situation as today, energy input is the most highly correlated property to the price of a good).
If it was only able to re-arrange atoms you would still need mines to get to the necessary minerals, and many things would remain rare (e.g. you wouldn't be able to make gold jewels any cheaper).
I
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energy input is the most highly correlated property to the price of a good
I assume you mean wholesale price. I would love someone to do the footwork to correlate the price of a CD to the energy input to producing it, for example. :P
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Why are you changing gears to DVD's though and talking about special effects and huge teams of people?
I do not believe you can say very much empirical energy is spent on a "brand" however, without falling down the slippery slope of baking an apple pie for Carl Sagan [youtube.com].
The item I was citing is a CD. So forget all of your visuals for a moment, all of your digitally rendered special effects, pyrotechnics, and location shoots, and focus on a band, no more than a handful of sound technicians and computers, and the
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Of course you're right. The only reason cost tends toward energy cost of the creation of an object is that the profit tends towards zero in a perfect market-based system, and that can of course be distorted in a myriad of ways.
Right on, I'm glad we're on the same page then. :)
TBH, in order to either index the wholesale price or to index a well-market-regulated retail price, I am now very fond of your energy utilization idea. It's very reminiscent of the work of Nikolai Kardashev [wikipedia.org], who saw the index of energy utilization as powerful enough to extrapolate and infer the capacities of hypothetical intergalactic civilizations.
Another useful application of such a measuring tool, per our discussion, might be that if energy utilization is
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That's pretty much how they're able to explain the "utopia" that is the federation - there is no (monetary) value to property, so essentially it's similar to socialism or comunism, but it works as greed cannot have any effect.
The idea of an economy without the cost of goods figured in to it (and many services, too) has a long following in science fiction. I remember George O. Smith's "Venus Equilateral" series for the replicator impact, Asimov's robots series for the services impact, and of course Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (Bladerunner) for the social impact.
Anything that lasts that long in SF has some possibility of eventuating in reality, I reckon. SF has long been the only outlet for ideas for
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I call it a "Star Trek replicator" because the first time I saw one was on Star Trek, in 1966. I was always an avid science fiction reader (my favorites were Asimov and Heinlein), and hadn't run across that idea before, although I'm sure there was someone's story I hadn't read that had it.
No cultural monopoly, it's just that that's where I first saw one.
Nothing to say... (Score:2)
A friend of mine worked at a place that had a machine that did this with a laser and plastic powder, and he had some amazing little prototype bits; Very art-like.
[CITATION NEEDED]
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LMGTFY
http://laserrepro.com/ [laserrepro.com]
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I think with one of these and some glue, and I could build a skyscraper out of the dust in my apartment, I'm finding as I prepare to move out...
Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I’m sorry?? That stuff is illegal since at least a decade now, isn’t it?
It’s well-known that that ”sealing” never is really complete, and in practice of construction, there will always be some holes in it. I know because I know of families who nearly died from that. (In their cases it was really shoddy construction. But better construction still never makes the problem completely go away.)
And something being bad is not a valid argument about how bad something else is.
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And something being bad is not a valid argument about how bad something else is.
No, but assessing comparable risks to put the "badness" in perspective is valid for argument.
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You're thinking of asbestos, maybe...
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I get your point that insulation in home construction is very different from construction with moon dust, however I do feel like I should make this one point:
in practice of construction, there will always be some holes in it.
If there is one group of people that ought to be very talented at building things that don't have holes, its astronauts.
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The issue in part is the fact that it isn't clear that you can perfectly decontaminate material being passed through airlocks. So in fact sealing reduces the problem considerably but does not eliminate it by itself.
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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.
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Concrete dust has many of the properties of lunar dust.
Well, except for the whole razor-sharp-jaggies-that-never-get-worn-down-by-weather property. And the, the-whole-moon-is-covered-with-that-crap property. But yeah, other than that, it's exactly the same. oO
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And the, the-whole-moon-is-covered-with-that-crap property.
Sure. And for all the parts of the Moon that pose an exposure risk to the moondust-o-death, if you're standing there unprotected from this evil powder, you have a far more immediate health risk [wikipedia.org] to deal with.
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Sure. And for all the parts of the Moon that pose an exposure risk to the moondust-o-death, if you're standing there unprotected from this evil powder, you have a far more immediate health risk to deal with.
Exactly! It's kinda like how, if I had a vacuum sealed house, I'd never ever get dust inside! Right?
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Well, except for the whole razor-sharp-jaggies-that-never-get-worn-down-by-weather property
Its not all that different than many materials man has used over the centuries to create concrete with.
Here's one example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozzolana [wikipedia.org]
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You must be fucking terrified of interior concrete walls then.
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You must be fucking terrified of interior concrete walls then.
Yes, because that would probably mean I was in prison or some other godawful unpleasant place.
I have never met a concrete wall that I like. It just struck me that this is sort of like Thomas
Edison's worst invention ever, the poured concrete house. [flyingmoose.org]
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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
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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]:
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From your link, silicosis occurs due to particles less than 10 micrometers wide. Regolith is typically more than 30 micrometers wide.
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From your link, silicosis occurs due to particles less than 10 micrometers wide. Regolith is typically more than 30 micrometers wide.
And yet:
Re:Moondust-From Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
Yes, but they're directly breathing it in. One would think that not many people will be inhaling dust directly from the lunar surface, since there's no air to breathe. It'd only be there by deposition on clothing, such as mentioned in the article. And I wouldn't wear a respirator in the mine's break room, or upstairs of my wood shop.
I didn't know about the whole glove-damaging aspect. That's really interesting.
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You're the one who brought up breathing it.
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Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon?
Yeah and each person spent about a day on the moon followed by a few days travelling back to earth in a spaceship that was undoubtedly somewhat contaminated with moondust.
Oh and there were less than 20 of them in total by my count.
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Gypsum: The stuff in all the drywall in your house.
From the MSDS:
"Chronic exposures may result in lung disease (silicosis and/or lung cancer)"
etc. I don't think this is a very well thought out argument.
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> Moondust
> pure lunacy!
I see what you did there.
Re:what can you do without scaffolding? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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When did slashdot become a random blog aggregator instead of news for nerds?
Roughly at the same time as the word "blog" became common.
FYI, HTH, and so on, and so forth, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
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The energy cost here won't be in the device power requirement, it'll be in preparing the glue. Think about the energetic cost of cement for instance, now consider the "super-glue" used is an even more ambitious cement...