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Good to see strong progress being made in 3D printing in space.
https://www.space.com/40516-made-in-spa … tract.html
This will be a vital technology for both the Earth-Mars transit and for creating an industrial infrastructure on Mars.
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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This is the company trying to work on this ability onboard the ISS. There are many things being made for rockets these days from the various 3D processes and materials from the also wide variety of machines. Not all 3D printings are equal for the finished product or costs and that includes the quality level as well.
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The project seems to be going well. I can only presume that doing 3D printing in 0.38 G is a lot easier than in zero G. But the Mars Mission will probably need some emergency zero G capability for 3D printing so I really welcome this project.
This is the company trying to work on this ability onboard the ISS. There are many things being made for rockets these days from the various 3D processes and materials from the also wide variety of machines. Not all 3D printings are equal for the finished product or costs and that includes the quality level as well.
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/3d-printed-b … 00692.html
Charles Hilu
Sat, July 17, 2021, 9:00 AMUpon its completion, the 3D-printed bridge won a Dutch Design Award for the category of design research.
“The leap in research into 3D printing opens the door, once and for all, to other (large and/or public) applications in architecture and the metal industry,” the awards committee said. “The jury is curious to see how this will be emulated, and where it will lead. Laarman has set the bar high, with an extraordinary choice of material: steel, a typically (conservative) construction material, known for its extremely static properties. The form and material freedom achieved by the design hint at almost unimaginable scenarios.”
The use of steel for this project caught my eye.
I wonder how the "printer" created the structure?
Simple welding is a possibility.
A continuous bead could have been laid under computer control.
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https://www.designboom.com/design/world … 7-16-2021/
That technology could be very useful on Mars!
Although there's almost no running water on the surface, there could still be a need to bring gullies and the like when creating road trails.
I am sure it could have many other applications...maybe greenhouse construction?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/3d-printed-b … 00692.html
Charles Hilu
Sat, July 17, 2021, 9:00 AMUpon its completion, the 3D-printed bridge won a Dutch Design Award for the category of design research.
“The leap in research into 3D printing opens the door, once and for all, to other (large and/or public) applications in architecture and the metal industry,” the awards committee said. “The jury is curious to see how this will be emulated, and where it will lead. Laarman has set the bar high, with an extraordinary choice of material: steel, a typically (conservative) construction material, known for its extremely static properties. The form and material freedom achieved by the design hint at almost unimaginable scenarios.”
The use of steel for this project caught my eye.
I wonder how the "printer" created the structure?
Simple welding is a possibility.
A continuous bead could have been laid under computer control.
(th)
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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For Louis re #5 ... thanks for that very nice follow up to the initial steel bridge report.
If there is a member with posting privileges who can discover the process used to 3D print steel on this scale, I'd certainly appreciate seeing it added to this topic!
It would seem (to me at least) reasonable to suppose that there may be cost savings realizable by builders around the World, so that I would expect to see the Dutch process licensed for use elsewhere.
The addition of sensors to measure the performance of the structure under varying load, and under varying environmental conditions, is as important (to my way of thinking) as the innovation itself. If the structure should show signs of failure, hopefully the sensors will provide plenty of warning.
If there is a forum reader who would like to contributed to this topic, and is not yet a member, please read Post #2 of Recruiting.
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Here is an update on progress in development of materials for 3D printing...
I ** think ** the seminar/webinar offered below is free ... please let me know if you find otherwise....
Don’t miss Addigy® P3001: The Next Generation Material for SLS 3D Printing, an informative webinar presented by Shapeways and Covestro on November 8, 2022 at 10 a.m. ET / 3 p.m. GMT.
Our presenters will be highlighting Addigy P3001, a versatile thermoplastic elastomer. This 3D printing material is suitable for making industrial parts ranging from gaskets to footwear or protective sports devices like mouth guards.
This new material is available now, and we hope you will join us to learn about all of its innovative possibilities.
As some of you know I have a small shop in the ShapeWays environment. From time to time they send me updates on their products. It is unusual to have an offer of a formal presentation, so I thought there might be someone in NewMars would would be interested.
Science Fiction writers have imagined a "smart" space suit, that would wrap it's wearer securely against vacuum, while simultaneously providing heating and cooling as needed, and more importantly, exerting force upon itself as necessary to move away from the wearer's limbs as they move.
The net effect ** should ** be a nearly effortless walk across a surface.
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A talk on 3D printing of parts for an amateur telescope will be given tomorrow at NSS North Houston
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 64#p208364
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A relative sent this link ...
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/manufac … -and-mars/
The article is intended for a broad audience. It might be a good fit for this forum, because it provides an overview of current progress from NASA's perspective.
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This Moon Rover Wheel Could be 3D Printed on the Moon
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/startup-ceo- … 00027.html
Startup CEO says ‘the house of the future costs as much as a car’ — here’s how the company plans to make it happen
Susan Elizabeth Turek
Wed, October 11, 2023 at 9:00 AM EDT·2 min read
91New technology from Japanese startup Serendix may eventually turn the dream of home ownership from the seemingly impossible into the possible for many Americans — and help us give our planet an assist in the process.
Serendix, which hopes to make housing more affordable, recently combined 3D printing and CNC machining to build a house for the cost of roughly $37,600, according to Adele Peters of Fast Company.
Compare that with the median cost of a house in the United States: approximately $430,300, according to The Ascent, a review platform of The Motley Fool.
“The house of the future costs as much as a car,” Serendix CEO Kunihiro Handa told Peters.
Handa added that the company’s goal is to fully automate the housing industry — much like Japan did with the auto industry more than 40 years ago.
3D printing has been around since the 1980s, when Dr. Hideo Kodama created a machine that hardened material with UV light, according to The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. As the technology — and the laws surrounding its use — has evolved, so have the opportunities for its application.
Today, an array of 3D-printing materials is available. According to Fast Company, in order to keep costs down, Serendix utilized concrete to print the walls of its 538-square-foot “barnacle” unit, giving an individual or a couple a bit of extra stretching room than a typical 100- to 400-square foot tiny house.
The home design is constructed around steel columns and includes one bedroom, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen.
Saerendix 2
Photo Credit: SerendixSaerendix 3
Photo Credit: SerendixAn added bonus? Small homes are eco-friendly because they need less energy to run, so your bank account and the Earth will be thankful. While an average-sized home in the U.S. is responsible for approximately 28,000 pounds of harmful carbon pollution per year, tiny homes emit around 2,000, according to the American Institute of Architects.
Serendix told Peters that its 3D-printed house only took 44 hours and 30 minutes to build. The efficiency of the construction time means that negative environmental impact is reduced. Globally, the construction industry is responsible for 39% of polluting heat-trapping gases.
Serendix has five printers, according to Peters, each of which can construct 50 houses per year, and the company intends to add more in 2024 in order to reach a goal of 850 per year.
There’s no word yet on when the company’s technology could be available in the U.S.
Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the coolest innovations improving our lives and saving our planet.
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NASA Tests a 3D Printed Aluminum Rocket Nozzle
https://www.universetoday.com/163824/na … et-nozzle/
When it comes to the current era of space exploration, one of the most important trends is the way new technologies and processes are lowering the cost of sending crews and payloads to space. Beyond the commercial space sector and the development of retrievable and reusable rockets, space agencies are also finding new ways to make space more accessible and affordable. This includes NASA, which recently built and tested an aluminum rocket engine nozzle manufactured using their new Reactive Additive Manufacturing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (RAMFIRE) process.
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The local 3D Printer User Group is in session. I am attending by an online service called gather.com.
The service works well in both Windows and Linux, and I expect it would do as well with Apple.
If anyone in the NewMars membership has a question about 3D printers, I would be happy to arrange for the member to log into the session, and I'll attempt to facilitate conversation with the folks in the meeting room. The meeting is taking place in a local Maker Space called the Idea Foundry. The facility is set up on a refurbished factory building. There is a lot of activity in the maker space here, and 3D printing is just a tiny part of it. The leader of the local 3D group works for RedHat (IBM) and is as knowledgeable as you might expect.
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China's Chang'e-8 Mission Will Try to Make Bricks on the Moon
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One application where 3D printing may be very valuable on Mars is in producing metal casting moulds. We cannot easily print with molten steel. But if casting moulds can be printed from a mixture of sand and clay, it would allow quite complex one-off castings to be produced for components that we need. In situations where we want a lot of repeatable shapes, injection moulding is probably a better technique for producing sand casting moulds. This can produce a lot of moulds very rapidly. In both cases we start with an aqueous slurry of sand and clay, probably about 70:30 mix by volume. The high sand content prevents cracking as the mould dries.
The 3D printing technique uses a nozzle to extrude the material onto a surface. Injection moulding forces the paste into a mould using a hydraulic piston. Injection moulding will be faster and cheaper. But is only suitable when you want a lot of something. For building habitats on the surface of Mars, we can build geodesic domes from single repeatable strut units, which form triangular elements when bolted or glued together. The struts could be made from cast iron or cast basalt. In both cases, we need thousands of identical sand casting moulds that we can pour hot molten material into. Injection moulding is ideal here. If we need something like an engine block, then 3D printing can produce a one-off casting mould.
Last edited by Calliban (2024-02-22 05:19:17)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #15
Your mention of geodesic domes caught my eye.... There is at least one web site devoted to them, and there are probably many more.
For our readers who are not familiar with geodesic dome design, I would offer the caution that the pieces that are combined to make the structure are (apparently) not the same length. I've forgotten the details, and hope someone will have time to report the different length elements that are needed to construct such a dome.
However, your basic concept of making forms for metal using 3D printing seems likely (to me at least) to become widely recognized as a convenient solution to a pesky problem. Shapeways is a company that has been in the 3D printing business for some time, and they have the distinct advantage of offering their services to ordinary citizens.
Your idea/suggestion of building moulds is one that seems well worth investigating further.
Further reporting on this concept would be welcome, if anyone has the time.
On Earth, making of moulds for casting is an industry. It could well become one on Mars.
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TH, you are correct the struts used for constructing domes have 2 or 3 lengths, depending upon the number of subdivisions. This explains more.
https://mathcircle.berkeley.edu/sites/d … odesic.pdf
This surprised me, given that the structural divisions of a hemispherical geodesic dome are supposed to be equalatoral triangles. One would expect that a sphere with a constant radius of curvature composed of equalatorial triangles, should have constant strut dimensions. That is what equalatoral means. But apparently not. I am still trying to wrap my head around why that is.
It does mean that the two strut lengths will need seperate moulds, which introduces a little more complexity, though not much. In assembling the dome, my preference would be to use epoxy glue to bond the corners, if struts are made from cast basalt. This avoids the need for bolting and also avoids stress concentrations around the bolts. Cast iron is much stronger and can be welded. If the structure is going to be covered in regolith and kept warm for human habitation, then stress cracking is less likely to be a problem. So we could bolt cast iron domes, weld them or even glue struts into place.
On Earth, if we were going to cover a dome in a layer of rock and dirt, we would probably use chicken wire as a net spanning the structure and then plaster the inside. This prevents regolith from falling between the gaps. That woukd work on Mars, but wire is something that would have to be extruded and then twisted together. Other alternatives might be to: (1) Find rocks that are coarse enough to span the gaps for the first layer heaper over the domes; (2) Make cast iron or plastic panels that can plug the triangular gaps; (3) Cast triangular plates instead of rods as the structural elements; (4) Cover the whole structure with a sheet of polyethylene prior to covering with overburden. I'm not sure which would work best.
Last edited by Calliban (2024-02-22 11:15:20)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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This post is about advanced 3D printing ... I'm hoping Calliban might find it interesting ... If I understand the report correctly, this clever use of 3D printing yields ultra-strong ultra-lightweight structures ... I could see this concept in significant use in Large Ship.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo … eb61&ei=23
A 3D-printed titanium 'metamaterial' design solved a longtime engineering issue
Story by Andrew Paul • 14h • 2 min readEngineers used a process in which a laser instantly flashes metal powder into a fused solid.
© Credit: RMIT
Cellular structures made from metal alloys could strengthen everything from bone implants to rocket parts—if they didn’t keep cracking under pressure. Researchers have so far spent years attempting to solve for uneven weight distribution issues across these artificial “metamaterials” to little success. As detailed in a recent study published in Advanced Materials, however, a team at Australia’s RMIT University appears to have finally figured out the solution after drawing inspiration from plants and coral, with some help from a cutting-edge 3D-printing tool.A 3D-printed titanium 'metamaterial' design solved a longtime engineering issue
© Provided by Popular Science
Using a common titanium alloy, engineers manufactured latticelike structures composed of hollow struts—each imbued with an additional, thin band running throughout it. According to Ma Qian, an RMIT Distinguished Professor of advanced manufacturing and study co-author, the team combined “two complementary lattice structures to evenly distribute stress, we avoid the weak points where stress normally concentrates.”
Compression testing shows (left) stress concentrations in red and yellow on the hollow strut lattice, while (right) the double lattice structure spreads stress more evenly to avoid hot spots. Credit: RMIT
“These two elements together show strength and lightness never before seen together in nature,” Qian continued in a university profile published on Monday.
To construct their lattice metamaterials, researchers utilized a highly advanced manufacturing process known as laser powder bed fusion, in which a powerful laser beam flash-melts layered titanium granules directly into place. Subsequent stress tests of a cube made from the new, hollow latticework withstood 50-percent more weight than a similarly dense cast of WE54, a magnesium alloy commonly used for aerospace engineering.
Although the resilient metamaterial can already withstand temperatures up to 350-degrees Celsius (662 Fahrenheit), its makers believe that utilizing more heat-resistant titanium alloys could raise that threshold up to 600-degrees Celsius (1,112 Fahrenheit). If so, the metalwork could find more uses in rocketry manufacturing, and even firefighting drones.
Related video: Metal parts are producing by the help of 3D printers (Times of India)
Metal parts are producing by the help of 3D printers
[Related: Titanium-fused bone tissue connects this bionic hand to a patient’s nerves.]
Meanwhile, the team thinks these lattice structures could also prove useful in human bone implants, since their hollowness may allow for bone cell regrowth as the equipment fuses with a patient’s body.
That said, it might be a little while before the titanium metamaterial becomes commonplace. As study lead author and PhD candidate Jordan Noronha explained in RMIT’s feature, “Not everyone has a laser powder bed fusion machine in their warehouse.”
Still, Noronha, Qian, and their colleagues believe technological advances and increased equipment accessibility will eventually make it easier for others to also harness their metamaterial design.
Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.
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