Amazing: A 3-D Printer Which Uses The Saharan Sun Instead Of A Laser | Co. Design

When you were a kid, maybe you built a parabolic solar cooker as a science project and thought you were pretty hot stuff. (Zing!) Markus Kayser, who is not a kid but clearly has the lateral-thinking skills of one, did something much more impressive: he built a working 3-D printer that uses the sun's rays to sinter solid objects of out desert sand.

His demo video is about as pulse-poundingly paced as an Antonioni film, but that's appropriate given how slowly Kayser's "Solar Sinter" device works in real life. "In this experiment, sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3-D printing process that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology," he writes. Sintering is a technical term for "melting powder into solid objects," and selective laser sintering is a common 3-D printing technique. Kayser realized that the world's most powerful laser is right above our heads, and to conduct his experiment at maximum sintering strength (and also afford himself with abundant, free printing material), he dragged his rig out into the Sahara Desert near Siwa, Egypt, and got to work.

via fastcodesign.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales