Design research
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2 | Design research The Ten Principles of 3D Printing 01 | Manufacturing complexity is free. In traditional manufacturing, the more complicated an object’s shape, the more it costs to make. On a 3D printer, complexity costs the same as simplicity. Fabricating an ornate and complicated shape does not require more time, skill, or cost than printing a simple block. Free complexity will disrupt traditional pricing models and change how we calculate the cost of manufacturing things. 02 | Variety is free. A single 3D printer can make many shapes. Like a human artisan, a 3D printer can fabricate a different shape each time. Traditional manufacturing machines are much less versatile and can only make things in a limited spectrum of shapes. 3D printing removes the over-head costs associated with re-training human machinists or re-tooling factory machines. A single 3D printer needs only a different digital blueprint and a fresh batch of raw material. 03 | No assembly required. 3D printing forms interlocked parts. Mass manufacturing is built on the backbone of the assembly line. In modern factories, machines make identical objects that are later assembled by robots or human workers, sometimes continents away. The more parts a product contains, the longer it takes to assemble and the more expensive it becomes to make. By making objects in layers, a 3D printer could print a door and attached interlocking hinges at the same time, no assembly required. Less assembly will shorten supply chains, saving money on labor and transportation; shorter supply chains will be less polluting. 04 | Zero lead time. A 3D printer can print on demand when an object is needed. The capacity for on-the-spot manufacturing reduces the need for companies to stockpile physical inventory. New types of business services become possible as 3D printers enable a business to make specialty -- or custom -- objects on demand in response to customer orders. Zero-lead-time manufacturing could minimize the cost of long-distance shipping if printed goods are made when they are needed and near where they are needed. 05 | Unlimited design space. Traditional manufacturing technologies and human artisans can make only a finite repertoire of shapes. Our capacity to form shapes is limited by the tools available to us. For example, a molding machine can make only shapes that can be poured into and then extracted from a mold. A 3D printer removes these barriers, opening up vast new design spaces. A printer can fabricate shapes that until now have been possible only in nature. 06 | Zero skill manufacturing. Mass production and computer-guided manufacturing machines diminish the need for skilled production. A 3D printer gets most of its guidance from a design file. To make an object of equal complexity, a 3D printer requires less operator skill than does an injection molding machine. Unskilled manufacturing opens up new business models and could offer new modes of production for people in remote environments or extreme circumstances. 07 | Compact, portable manufacturing. Per volume of production space, a 3D printer has more manufacturing capacity than a traditional manufacturing machine. For example, an injection molding machine can only make objects significantly smaller than itself. In contrast, a 3D printer can fabricate objects as large as its print bed. If a 3D printer is arranged so its printing apparatus can move freely, a 3D printer can fabricate objects larger than itself. 08 | Less waste by-product. 3D printers that work in metal create less waste by-product than do traditional metal manufacturing techniques. Machining metal is highly wasteful as an estimated 90 percent of the original metal gets ground off and ends up on the factory floor. 3D printing is more wasteless for metal manufacturing. As printing materials improve, “Net shape” manufacturing could be a greener way to make things. 09 | Infinite shades of materials. Since traditional manufacturing machines carve, cut, or mold things into shape, these processes can’t easily blend together different raw materials. As multimaterial 3D printing develops, we will gain the capacity to blend and mix different raw materials. New previously inaccessible blends of raw material offer us a much larger, mostly unexplored palette of materials with novel properties or useful types of behaviors. 10 | Precise physical replication. A digital music file can be endlessly copied with no loss of audio quality. In the future, 3D printing will extend this digital precision to the world of physical objects. Scanning technology and 3D printing will together introduce high resolution shapeshifting between the physical and digital worlds. We will scan, edit, and duplicate physical objects to create exact replicas or to improve on the original.
Excerpted from Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, written by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman Some of these principles already hold true today. Others will come true in the next decade or two (or three). By removing familiar, timehonored manufacturing constraints, 3D printing sets the stage for a cascade of downstream innovation. In the following chapters we explore how 3D printing technologies will change the ways we work, eat, heal, learn, create and play. Let’s begin with a visit to the world of manufacturing and design, where 3D printing technologies ease the tyranny of economies of scale.
Design research | 3 Text based on a visit to the design museums exhibit ‘The Future is Here’.
How are our products made? Products are typically made using three basic types of manufacturing
The first Industiral Revolution saw changes in manufacturing and industry that transformed our lives. Will a New Industrial Revolution have such lasting and far reaching consequences? Developments in digital fabrication technologies will inevitably affect manufacturing, but hwat about industries such as agriculture and healthcare? Could a rise in smaller scale making see production move away from centralised hubs and return to local and rural locations? If we become less reliant on mass production will there be a repatriation of manufacturing from the Far East back to the West? In order for new technologies and innovations to become truly establised and understood, it is vital that we are introduced to them at a formative age. How will this affect schools and education, and how will digital fabrication techniques be taught? How else will schools use local and on-demand manufacturing services? Could this be helpful in producing the tools for learning as well as the content?
Mass Production Additive Manufacturing The process of adding, combining smaller elements
layering
and
Digital fabrication is sometimes viewed in terms of desktop manufacturing and the DIY movement. However there are countless examples of new technologies and manufacturing innovations used in high value and large scale manufacturing. As digital fabrication models become more sophisticated they offer genuine alternatives to the established techniques of industrial production. This is not to say that there will soon be no place for the traditional factory. There will always be situations where economies of scale make mass production the sensible solution. However the era of mass production as the only alternative to craft and artisan manufacturing may be coming to an end. The New Industrial Revolution will enable a diversity of manufacturing.
Subtractive Manufacturing
The removal of parts or elements from a larger object
Transformative Manufacturing
Creating an object by altering the shape or behaviour of a material
Mass Customisation Conventional production techniques make it too expensive to allow for mass customisation. The large investment in initial tooling needed to make objects, such as automotive components or injection moulded plastic chairs, requires the products to be sold in tens or hundreds of thousands in order for them to be profitable. While the cost of making a single steering wheel could be enormous, after the same factory has made and sold a million cost of each unit could be as little as a few pence. Any changes to the design of the steering wheel would result in a new investment in tooling and the cycle would begin again. What if digital manufacturing could challenge the established economies of scale and alter an alternative approach? Without the constraints imposed by large quantities, designers are free to make products that respond better to individual needs. Product development can be faster and more flexible. Mass customisation becomes a possibility, allowing users to directly engage with the production of their objects, creating personalised consumer goods.
cost per unit
Mass production Injection moulding Transformative maxnufacturing £10,000 for the mould plus £150 materials per duck Digital fabrication 3D Printing Additive manufacturing £15 per duck for time and materials
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4 | Design research 3D printing in Architecture While 3D printing is a reltively new technology it is already used for a host of commercial and domestic applications. These can vary from prototyping and modelmaking to high quality commercial applications such as the production of small metal components for the aerospace industries. There have been developments in the architectural uses of additive manufacturing, using either large format machines located on the building site or by producing small components to be assembled into larger structures. This potential applciation of these technologies has the power to change the way that buildings are both conceived and produced. I think that with each of these projects the promise of the 3D printer has not been realised to its full potential. In the case of the Canal House by DUS Architects, it seems unusual to take a construction tool and restrict it to conventional building techniques. By using printing as a construction tool you are not limited to set geometries, to spaces confined to boardwork in which it will be cast or the need to produce a mass producable design. One of the main advantages of a 3D printing system is that the parts are assembled for you, alleviating the need for skilled craftsmen or in fact any layperson. Where some of the proposed systems fall down is the fact that they have been designed as a set of components. While they take advantage of the customisability of them, the requirement for them to be assembled on site makes it a less efficient process than traditional construction. The Radiolaria Pavilion - Shiro Studio
Canal House - DUS Architects
Protohouse - Softkill Studio
Printed Structure - Smith Allen
Design research | 5 Sterolithography Sterolithography uses a laser to trace the first slice of an object on the top of a vat of liquid photopolymer resin, a material that changes its properties when exposed to light. The laser causes the resin to harden, forming an extremely thin slice on the object. The slice is then lowered very slightly before the process is repeated, forming a new slice, until the object is complete. This breakthrough in 3D printing was first invented by Charles Hull in 1984.
Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) A laser is used to trace the shape of an object’s initial slice accross a thin layer of granular or powdered material. After the laser has fused together the first slice, a new layer of powder is spread over the initial one and the process begins again.
Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) A coil of plastic filament or metal wire is passed through a nozzle heated to a temperature just above the material’s melting point. The nozzle then traces out a shape, building up an object layer upon layer. This method is used by the majority of desktop 3D printers.
Material Jetting
RepRap Desktop 3D Printer
As with other forms of 3D printing, objects are created in layers with each one formed from a liquid photopolymer emitted by an inkjet-style printer mechanism. After each layer is printed it is exposed to ultraviolet light, causing it to solidify before the next is made. Sophisticated jetting processes emit different materials in multiple combinations, producing different types of finish within the same object.
The RepRap uses a fused deposition modelling (FDM) process to heat thin filaments of plastic, which are then extruded through an applicator to create three-dimensional objects on layer at a time. The RepRap was the first of the low cose 3D printers and is available as a kit of parts for users to assemble themselves. It was conceived as an open source project supported by a network of users and developers sharing information about how to construct, use, modify and improce their machines. Since many of the machine’s components are made of plastic they are designed to be easily printed by another RepRap. It is this form of self-replicating repid prototyping that gives the machine its name.
RepRap Mendel
Universal paste extruder
6 | Design research Functionally Graded Rapid Prototyping (FGRP) The FGRP approach combines a novel software environment with a mechanical output tool designed as a 3D Printer to allow computer control of material distribution within a monolithic structure. Inspired by integration of material, structure and form found in natural systems, this biologically inspired design approach allows for physical prototyping of graduated properties in product and architectural design scales. FGRP introduces the potential to dynamically mix, grade and vary the ratios of different materials, resulting in continuous gradients, and structurally optimised designs with efficient use of materials, reductions in waste and production of highly customisable features. MIT Media lab have been working with Variable Density Concrete. It is currently a work-in-progress for the rapid fabrication of variable-density cement foams. Prototypes are presented illustrating foams of varying densities using aluminum powder admixtures. The project is motivated by the hypothesis that density gradients in structural building components made of concrete may increase the strength of a structural component while reducing material waste. The work is inspired by load-induced variable densities found in cancellous bone and by radial-gradient densities found in palm tree stems. Palm trees maintain a roughly uniform diameter along their height by thickening the cell walls in certain regions, producing radial density gradients across the surface and volume area of the stem. The density is highest at the peripheries and lowest in the center, for example with densities ranging from 100-1000 kg/m3 in a single stem of the Iriartea gigantea (Rich 1987).
Bone structure
Cross section of palm tree stem
3D printed concrete inspired by palm tree
Design research | 7 Solar Sinter - Markus Kayser In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance. In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology. Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and triggers dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource - the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers, this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking. The Solar Sinter uses a large Fresnel lens to focus a beam of sunlight, creating temperatures between 1400 and 1600 degrees Celsius. This is hot enough to melt silica sand and build up glass shapes, layer by layer, inside a box of sand mounted under the lens. Solar-powered motors move the box on an x and y axis along a computer-controlled path and a new layer of sand is sprinkled on top after each pass of the light beam. Light sensors track the sun as it moves across the sky and the whole machine rotates on its base to ensure the lens is always producing the optimum level of heat. Once all the layers have been melted into place the piece is allowed to cool and dug out from the sand box.
Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter
Printed bowl
Printer in action
8 | Design research Mycelium Chair - Eric Klarenbeek The chair is the result of a collaboration between Klarenbeek and scientists at the University of Wageningen to develop a new way of printing with living organisms. The result is a new material that, Klarenbeek believes, could be used to make almost anything in future. “It could be a table, a whole interior or even a house,” he said. “We could build a house with it.” The Mycelium Chair was printed using a mixture of water, powdered straw and mycelium, which is the thread-like part of a fungus that lives underground. The mycelium grew within the structure, replacing the water and creating a solid but extremely lightweight material. Mushrooms began sprouting on the surface, at which point Klarenbeek dried out the structure to prevent further growth. When you dry it out you have the straw kind of glued together by the mushroom,” Klarenbeek said. “You have this strong, solid material that is really lightweight and durable.” A thin layer of printed bioplastic covers the structure of the chair to contain the growing fungus. Straw was used as a substrate since the fungus used in the project - the yellow oyster mushroom - likes to grow on straw. Mycelium Chair
Printed straw
Printer
Design research | 9 Precious Plastic - Dave Hakkens “Of all the plastic thrown away, I’ve heard that we recycle just ten percent and I wondered why we recycle so little,” One of the issues turned out to be a lack of demand for recycled material from factories, so he visited a range of firms making plastic products to ask why they weren’t using recycled plastic to find that difficulties with sorting plastics for recycling make the resultant material less reliable than brand new plastic.
Low-tech plastic recycling machines
The Precious Plastic machines include a plastic shredder, extruder, injection moulder and rotation moulder, which are all based on industrial machines but modified to be less
Closed Loop Production At a time when the life of a mobile phone is more likely to be measured in moneths than years, let along decades, the design industry can play a vital role. By using principles such as closed loop, product designers can help to make the most of the planet’s finite resources. There are many different types of closed loop system. Long-loop systems, for example, attempt to minimise the effects of technological physical or visual absolescence, maximising the lifecycle of a product. Products that use natural loops are made from materials that can be easily broken down into biological nutrients. These products can be left to decompose in natural environments, eventually returning to the local ecosystem in the same form that they were taken out. Another form of closed loop design is multiple loop systems. Perhaps the most realistic, given our current rates of consumption, multiple loops help us return products to an additional or alternative other use. This requires considered design and construction that allows products to be recycled easily, as well as procedures put in place by manufacturers to help recover products after use to be refilled or repurposed. Plastic extrusion
Can City - Studio Swine Over 80 percent of the city’s recycling is collected informally on carts pulled by independent waste collectors known as catadores. Studio Swine wanted to create a system that would help them recycle the rubbish they collect into products they can sell. The pair collected discarded cans from a street vendor and used cooking oil for fuel to smelt the aluminium on site, turning the street into an improvised manufacturing line. They made moulds by pressing objects they found locally into sand collected from construction sites in the area. The resulting stools have tops that bear the impressions of ventilation bricks, a palm leaf, the base of a basket, a hub cap and plastic
Can City - sand cast
Can City - Result
10 | Design research I am looking to use non-conventional materials with my 3D printing construction method. There is already some experiementation being done using different material mixes, using concrete, wood, paper & salt by a research group called Emerging Objects. The use of different materials appears promising however the application seems somewhat limited, sofar only being demonstrated as a form of cladding rather than a new method of construction.
Emerging Objects Emerging Objects is interested in the creation of 3D printed architecture, building components and furnishings that can be seen as sustainable, inexpensive, stronger, smarter, recyclable, customizable and perhaps even reparable to the environment. We want to 3D print long-lasting performance-based designs for the built environment using raw materials that have strength, tactility, cultural associations, relevance and beauty.
Shed Shed is a small 3D printed prototype building constructed with Emerging Objects Picoroco Blocks™ printed in cement and salt materials. 3D Cement is used for the main cladding and 3D Salt for the side windows to allow in light. The Hive Blocks™ have been adapted to accommodate the growth of vegetation to create a green wall on the facade and roof.
Design research | 11
Concrete
Lime
Salt
Sand
Agricultural waste
Soil
Paper
Wood pulp
Plastic
Mycelium
Bacteria - Biomineralisation
Cellulose
12 | Design research Current 3D printers appear quite limited in their material use, using a select few different forms of plastic. This is fine for a desktop scale production of small objects, but to architecturalise this as a construction method, plastic is an expensive, ugly and environmentally damaging method. I have searched for a variety of different materials that might be more appropriate, whether they are existing building materials, natural materials, recycled materials or even biological materials.
Fluidsolids
Precious Plastic
Sahara Surreal
Fluidsolids is a newly manufactured material made entirely of industrial biproducts and is fully biodegradable. It consists of fibre, a filling material and a binding agent and can be moulded and extruded into heighly precise structural components and products that, both lightweight and durable, replace the need for metal or plastic.
Precious Plastic is a local recycling project by Dave Hakkens which minimises the amount of processing and the efficiency required in plastic recycling. By taking out processes such as plastic seperation, It uses a mixture of waste plastic that is ground down and reshaped using moulding and extruding techniques. This highlights the possibility that recycling can be performed simply and locally and make effective use of the material mix. This method could be further refined into a filament for 3D printing.
Magnus Larsson used bacillus pasteurii, a bacterial microorganism abundantly available in marshes and wetlands, the loose sand will be transformed into a fibrous porous structure that will sustainably control desertification while housing thousands of refugees. the crux of the project however lies in the natural microbial reaction of the bacteria with the sand particles that turn them into organic dunes of structurally-sound sandstone. His ‘structure is 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.‘
Fluidsolids
Precious Plastics
Sahara Surreal
Design research | 13 There are numerous examples of natural materials being used in 3D printing. Most of these do not bind naturally and make use of a lot of resin for example. Fluidsolids is an example of a material produced that is entirely natural, yet has the properties of plastic. Though the recipe is a patented creation it stemmed from experimentation with starchy bioplastics.
Fluidsolids Fluidsolids is a newly manufactured material made entirely of industrial biproducts and is fully biodegradable. It consists of fibre, a filling material and a binding agent and can be moulded and extruded into heighly precise structural components and products that, both lightweight and durable, replace the need for metal or plastic. If it is possible to produce a natural material in this way that have similar prospects to plastic, then it should be possible to 3D print it. This means that any natural material that can be made fine enough to fit through an extruder, be it salt, straw or in the case of Fluidsolids agricultural waste, can then be 3D printed with a simple mixture with bio plastic. In order to do that I will have to create something to extrude the material so that it can be fed into a 3D printer.
This is a design for a plastic extruder based on an absraction of one of Dave Hakkens prototypes for his project ‘Precious Plastic’
14 | Design research
carbonation CaO(OH)2 + CO2 = CaCO3
+ carbon dioxide
LIME calcium carbonate CaCO3
CaO(OH)2 calcium hydroxide HYDRATION
+ water
Heat 1100oC
calcination or burning CaCO3 + HEAT = CaO + CO2
CaO calcium oxide QUICK LIME
Hydration or slaking CaO + H2O = Ca(OH)2 + HEAT
Is it possible to change heat the marble dust (which is a form of calcium carbonate) to produce lime? This process would allow the material to remain in its original state whilst allowing it to be reshaped into a new built structure. The prospect of this is that building materials could be used again and again... I would like to use waste and natural materials as part of the construction process. I came accross this example of waste marble dust being used for 3D printing.
Fluidsolids
Fluidsolids
MarbleEcoDesign 3D Marble-Eco Design was born in the marble quarries of Coreno Ausonio, in southern Lazio. There mission is to reutilize the waste material resulting from the marbles production process. Sludge and waste are a consequence of the production system, this marble dust is complex and expensive to dispose of. But if mixed with special resins and catalysed with UV rays, these substances can be brought back to a new life and transformed in raw material ideal for 3D printing, with technically no use limitations, from architecture to design, from art and fashion to industrial purposes. This technology is capable of transforming ideas in real environment-friendly projects.
Rather than mixing the marble dust with resin, I am considering the prospect of heating up the dust in order to convert it into hydrated lime. This means that when it is printed, it would set naturally and return to its natural form (calcium carbonate. When the building has then completed its use and is to be demolished it can then be ground down and go through the process again to produce a new structure. The benefit of Lime as a monolithic structure is that it is weatherproof, rather than waterproof. This means, unlike concrete, the structure does not retain water, it instead allows any water that penetrates into the structure to fall back out once the source of water has ceased. It also is a much more flexible material than concrete, meaning that it can shift naturally with any ground movement.
Precious Plastics
Sahara Surreal
Design research | 15
Wasted spatial gap
Fully utilised space
One of the greatest prospects of 3D printing is the fact that you are able to place material exactly where you want it. This presents the opportunity to avoid wasting material building up a whole wall when only certain parts are actually structural. Nature has presented a solution for this, in the form of the honey comb.
The Honey Comb The honey comb in beehives is formed from hundreds of hexagonal wax cells packed together. For bees, making the wax for the walls of the honeycomb is a very expensice business (A single bee produces just 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in their entire lifetime. Bees in a hive need to consume 6-8 pounds of honey to produce 1 pound of wax, which means they collectively need to fly more than 6 times around the world to produce that amount to produce that amount of wax!) So understandably they would want to use this expensice resource most efficiently, building the largest cells possible for a given amount of wax. A circle is the most efficient shape for an individual cell - it encloses the largest possible space for a given length of wall. Although we have some examples of circular buildings, it isn’t a good choice for the shape of rooms within a building. Circles don’t fit neatly together and wasted gaps of space would be left between circular rooms/spaces.
In order to make the most of your space you need a shape that tessellates or tiles. There are only three regular shapes that can tile the plane – triangles, squares and hexagons. So by choosing hexagons, the architects of the beehive, both this building and that of the bee, have chosen the most efficient shape for a room – the hexagonal walls enclose the largest possible areas while wasting no space between them. Bees have known about the benefits of hexagons for millennia, and we have suspected that hexagons were the most efficient way to divide up a flat plane from at least 300AD when Pappus of Alexandria posed this as a question. However this Honeycomb Conjecture was only proved mathematically just over a decade ago, by Thomas Hales in 1999. Although the architects of the Beehive were aware of all this maths, we can be pretty sure that the bees haven’t learnt any geometry. But nature, like mathematicians and architects, is keen on efficiency and will form shapes and arrangements that require the least amount of energy. The bees actually start by making roughly circular cells as these are the most effecient use of their wax. But as these pack together the walls bend to create a hexagonal arrangement.
16 | Design research