3D printing technology could lead to a greener product manufacturing and consumption. Above is the model for a 3D printed villa now in Dubai.
We were about 12 miles east of Limerick, Ireland when our tire blew out. So we melted the old tire into the 3D replicator, printed a new one and we were on our way.
Actually, no– we limped along on a dodgy spare until we found a tire shop open the night before Saint Patrick’s day. If this had been one of the more esoteric car parts, we might have waited weeks for it to be shipped from Japan. Objet Geometries (Rehovot, Israel) wants to change the way automobile parts are manufactured.
Their 3D printed dashboard has been touring the world as a component of the crowdsourced Streetscooter electric car.
3D printing or replication (read here about how it’s used to make bowls from sand) uses a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file to build up or carve out a real-world object. This technology could lead to a greener product manufacturing and consumption.
The future of 3D printing
- Can utilize greener materials such as plant-based biodegradable PLA plastics, paper and even sand. Or poo.
- Rapid prototyping wastes less material than injection molding, milling and other traditional manufacturing techniques.
- Reduces the distance products and replacement parts must be shipped.
- Allows consumers to reshape and recycle end-of-life products.
- Enables architects and designers to rapidly to prototype green concepts. See this villa in Dubai.
See the video of 3D printed bike parts
https://youtu.be/7w2wB6hW-OI
Vienna University of Technology printed a 3D race car the width of a human hair.
The scale of the printed object is limited by the size of the printer. Objet found it necessary to break their Streetscooter dashboard design into several smaller objects which were then assembled into the finished product.
But people are experimenting with 3D printing of construction materials and entire buildings. At the other end of the scale, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology used a laser to print a nanoscale race car, the width of a human hair.
3D printing is where desktop publishing was in the 1980s. Hobbyists such as these in Bahrain are only beginning to experiment with the possibilities of home replication.
By bringing manufacturing closer to home and empowering consumers to replace mass-production with mass customization, this technology could create a greener relationship between producers and consumers.
For the faithful, you can always print objects to keep your heart and mind pure. How about a 3D printed green dome mosque?
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
Laurie, thanks I just saw this the other day. I’m anxious to try it. It allows you to take several 2D photos of an object and use them to build a 3D model which can be printed!
Autodesk has released free 3D printing programs – 123D Catch and 123D Make. You can use them to render 3D models of anything – trick is to find someplace to print them out (at a price that doesn’t shock).
That last part is the deal-breaker!