3D-printing moondust bricks with focused solar heat
Bricks have been 3D printed out of simulated moondust using concentrated sunlight. This ESA project took place at the DLR German Aerospace Center facility in Cologne, with a 3D printer table attached to a solar furnace, baking successive 0.1 mm layers of moondust at a temperature of 1000°C. A 20 x 10 x 3 cm brick for building can be completed in around five hours. DLR Cologne’s solar furnace has two working setups: as a baseline, it uses 147 curved mirror facets to focus either actual sunlight into a high temperature beam, employed to melt together the grains of regolith. But this mode is weather dependent, so a solar simulator was subsequently employed as well – based on an array of xenon lamps more typically found in cinema projectors.
Copyrights
Video: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/
Music: Future Perfect 4 (60), David O’Brien, audionetwork.com
Thousands of autonomous robots building and baking bricks on the Moon and we'll have a nice Mün station !
Yes.
We are slowly getting there, Once these little beasties are tested on the surface of the moon and proved a viable option for building structures, I think that's when things will start moving a little faster. Congrats People!
Bravo c'est du beau travail! Continuez comme ca ^^
This type of printer would be considered SLA or FDM ????
Waste of time one brick every 5 hours ! you need thousands to build just a house
Envidia de no haber podido vivir estos adelantos, disfrútalos… yo no pude
Soy Maestro Industrial electricista de taller: de los de la postguerra española.
We may find that the moon is all ready populated by Moon Nazis.