Open Source 3-D Printer Design Competition

Queen's University and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada are sponsoring a new competition for sustainable development. The competition asks that you "design sustainable technologies and their components for printing on open source 3-D printers", specifically the RepRap. 

 

What exactly is a "sustainable technology"? We're not sure, because that's up to your and your imagination. The possibilities are endless. Winners will be evaluated on several important characteristics: printing feasibility, innovativeness, sustainability, concept feasibility and presentation. 

 

The competition is open now and closes in February 2012, with winners announced on the  15th of that month. The winner receives CA$1000, while the second place receives CA$250. Three runners-=up will also be announced. While this is sponsored by Canadian organizations, the contest is open to anyone, anywhere. All you need to do is upload your design to Thingiverse with a particular tag and they'll find it. 

 

Via Queen's U (PDF) and Boing Boing

3D Printing is a Cleantech Innovation

Pike Research, whose tagline is "Cleantech Market Intelligence" posted a report listing "Five Disruptive Cleantech Innovations". These, we presume, are technologies that should deliver dramatic ecological benefits to future generations as they come online in force later in this century. But what was on the list of five?

 

• Energy Harvesting
• Energy Storage
• Fuel Cell Tech
• Smart Meters
• 3D Printing

 

You might wonder why 3D printing is on this list of otherwise very energyish topics. We don't. We know why already. 

 

3D printing is incredibly favorable to the environment for one major reason: it enables the production of goods much closer to the consumer. 

 

Consider today's typical product lifecycle: Product is designed in the West; it is manufactured en masse in the East (usually in China) from raw materials that were expensively transported to China from parts elsewhere; Finished goods are packed and expensively shipped halfway across the world by ship, where they they travel even more by train and/or truck to a consumer retail destination; Finally consumer travels to a retail location to acquire and then transport the item back home. 

 

If you think about all the transportation involved in today's manufacturing cycle it's pretty astonishing. How much oil was used not to make your item, but simply to get it into your hands? 

 

If and when 3D printing sufficiently matures to a state where a good chunk of common items can be produced at home, then this transportation cycle could be short circuited significantly. 

 

But, before you say it, we have a very long way to go before this can occur. 3D printers must mature and develop much more capability; access to sufficiently topped up 3D model repositories must be available; and the general public must buy into the whole concept. Those are not easy things to achieve. 

 

But neither is dealing with climate change. 

 

Via Pike Research

3D Printed Crabs

No, we're not talking about pretty little crab toys you can print and hand out to your 8 year old nephew. Instead we're talking about an innovative project undertaken by one of MakerBot's artists in residence, Miles Lightwood. 

 

The project is concerned with the fate of the lowly Hermit Crab, a crustacean currently facing difficulty. The problem is the crab's shell: it doesn't actually have one. The hermit crab, you see, simply co-opts other leftover shells to make its own. However, in these days of increasing pollution, disappearing wild habitats and acidic water due to climate change, leftover shells are becoming harder to come by. 

 

Lightwood's project is to ask the 3D design community to produce designs for shells that can be used by hermit crabs. You might think designing a shell for a specific crab wouldn't be particularly interesting, but in fact it is because the hermit crab uses any old shell it comes across. But what is the best shell? What size of opening is best? Depth of chamber? Curve of shell? Weight? Shape? 

 

We don't know the answers, and you'd have a hard time asking a hermit crab, too. But the answer will be found by trying a great many designs, and that's where the crowd approach will work best. What design factors do you think the crabs will prefer? 

 

Via MakerBot and Thingiverse Tag "Project Shellter"

Carbon Credits Required For 3D Makers?

We're reading a piece on GearFuse that reviews a short video of folks designing and printing some very cool salt and pepper shakers - but they say some things we disagree with:

 

But should we be at least slightly concerned about the way 3D printing seems to make plastic crap safe for hipsters? A given unit of ABS plastic requires about twice its weight in petroleum to produce. I have two words for you, young person: carbon credits.

 

This may be true - ABS plastic requires additional petroleum to produce and perhaps even more to ship it to your printer. But let's consider the following:

 

• The amount of plastic used by a 3D printer is minuscule, compared to other common uses of petroleum. Five pounds of ABS can print hundreds of small objects and keep a printer busy for many days, but Five pounds of gasoline is less than one single US gallon, sufficient to power a typical car for about 20 miles. In other words, you'll burn far more in one hour in a car than you'd use in a month of 3D printing. 
• You don't have to print ABS plastic. Another wonderful alternative is PLA, short for Polylactic Acid. This substance, while a tad more brittle than ABS is commonly used in home 3D printers - and it's environmentally renewable, being derived from corn, tapioca or sugarcane. Work is underway to develop methods of mechanically recycling PLA for 3D printing. In other words, grind up your old objects into powder/filament and print new things. Of course, PLA will still require the same transport costs to your home as ABS.
• Finally, the idea of printing things at home reduces hugely polluting intercontinental shipping, because items can be produced at home without shipment (other than the raw material, which in theory can be produced locally). It's our understanding that container ships have limited or even no requirements for pollution controls, so less shipping would be highly desirable. 

 

We believe 3D printing will prove net environment friendly if examined at a high-level. 

 

Via GearFuse

Geological 3D Printing

 

It's not only geological, it's also transcontinental! What are we speaking of? It's an incredible proposal from architectural student Magnus Larsson, whose idea is almost beyond conception.

He proposes to use a form of biological 3D printing to create a habitable "green wall" across the entire width of the Sahara desert in order to reduce the effects of desertification.

The concept is to use flexible containers filled with common bacteria that are capable of solidifying the ubiquitous sand into rigid sandstone. By applying this technique on a continuous basis over many years, Larsson believes it is indeed possible to achieve this lofty goal.

According to Larsson:

... made straight from the dunescape by flushing a particular bacteria through the loose sand... which causes a biological reaction whereby the sand turns into sandstone; the initial reactions are finished within 24 hours, though it would take about a week to saturate the sand enough to make the structure habitable.

How can this actually work? Observe the artist's concept above and read Larsson's futuristic notions:

I researched different types of construction methods involving pile systems and realised that injection piles could probably be used to get the bacteria down into the sand – a procedure that would be analogous to using an oversized 3D printer, solidifying parts of the dune as needed. The piles would be pushed through the dune surface and a first layer of bacteria spread out, solidifying an initial surface within the dune. They would then be pulled up, creating almost any conceivable (structurally sound) surface along their way, with the loose sand acting as a jig before being excavated to create the necessary voids. If we allow ourselves to dream, we could even fantasise about ways in which the wind could do a lot of this work for us: solidifying parts of the surface to force the grains of sand to align in certain patterns, certain shapes, having the wind blow out our voids, creating a structure that would change and change again over the course of a decade, a century, a millenium.

Ambitious. Very ambitious. Let's get started!

Via BldgBlog and the Holcim Foundation