Glass has a number of unique properties that make it desirable as a 3D printed material, Rapp says. It’s also the first to take advantage of ordinary, off-the-shelf 3D stereolithography printers, meaning it can be used without much special equipment. Though Rapp’s technique isn’t the first example of 3D printing glass-MIT researchers developed a method for extruding molten glass two years ago, while other teams have used lower-temperature techniques that produce a weak, cloudy product-it is the first to print clear glass at low temperatures. The printed glass has high thermal shock resistance, as demonstrated here, when the fused silica glass is exposed to a flame of 800 degrees Celsius. Once the object is printed, it’s placed in a high temperature oven, which burns away the polymer and fuses the glass particles, leaving behind only hardened glass. Rapp’s team has figured out how to do this using powdered glass suspended in a liquid polymer. In stereolithography, the printer builds up the object layer by layer using a liquid-traditionally a polymer-that hardens when touched by a laser light. The technique makes use of a traditional method of 3D printing called stereolithography. Rapp’s team has come up with a new technique for 3D printing glass, one which can produce glass objects that are both strong and transparent. “Glass is one of the oldest materials that mankind has used, and it’s astonishing to see the 3D printing revolution of the 21st century has ignored glass until now,” says Bastian Rapp, a researcher at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. But glass has been almost absent from the equation. The most commonly used 3D printing materials are polymers, and techniques exist for printing metals, ceramics, concrete, medication, even food as well. Until now, this wouldn’t have been possible at all. But the project was six years late and hundreds of millions of euros over budget, with some of the overage due to the ancient, time-consuming molding technique used to curve the glass panels.īut what if the glass panels could simply have been printed with a 3D printer? The soaring structure has a façade of some 2,000 flat and curved glass panels, giving the impression of a wave about to break. Hamburg’s new concert hall opened late last year to acclaim from architectural critics around the world.
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