The art of 3D-printing is growing day by day and has now moved on to glass, as researchers have 3D-printed molten glass and made state-of-art final product from it too.
Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a system for 3D-printing glass that offers more control over the hot glass material and the final product. The additive manufacturing (AM) platform was used for the digital fabrication of transparent glass at an industrial scale.
Their system is named G3DP2 and is a new AM platform for molten glass that combines digitally integrated three-zone thermal chemical system with four-axis motion control system, introducing industrial-scale production capabilities with enhanced production rate and reliability while ensuring product accuracy and repeatability, all previously unattainable for glass, reported Tech Crunch.
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The project, as reported by Interesting Engineering, has two main goals; to create an industrial-scale molten glass 3D-printer, and also to develop a 3D-printer glass structure that is capable of evaluating practical capabilities of the new system in an industrial production.
The system makes use of a closed, heated box that holds the melted glass and another thermally controlled box where it prints out the object. A movable plate drops the object lower as it is being printed and the print head moves above it.
Researchers said that the combination of AM with molten glass presents a potential path toward manufacturing of greatly complex geometry and custom-designed objects while retaining the optical transparency and chemical stability available through traditional manufacturing processes.
The system is interesting since it actually creates clear glass structures that are used for decoration or building. Special care is taken to control the glass extrusion system in order to make sure that it cools down and crystallizes without injecting any impurities or having any structural problems.
“This approach is suitable for fabricating small and highly detailed parts such as microfluidics and optics because it delivers high precision and optical transparency,” the research stated.
For the future, the researchers aim to combine the advantages of this AM tech with the multitude of unique material properties of glass like strength, transparency, and chemical stability, in order to create new archetypes of multifunctional building blocks.