Neri Oxman and her team at MIT Media Lab have 3D-printed a collection of models using molten glass to demonstrate design and architectural applications for the process (+ movie).
The Mediated Matter group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a machine that extrudes the glass in its liquid form and builds it up in layers, like a 3D printer.
The project, titled G3DP: Additive Manufacturing of Optically Transparent Glass, resulted in a series of vessel-like structures.
Molten glass is used as a filament, inserted into the top of the machine and then extruded at a very high temperature as a thin strand.
Shapes are built up in a continuous spiral of layers. The sections below cool and solidify quickly enough to support the hot viscous material laid on top.
The extruder can be programmed to apply each of these layers in a slightly different shape, resulting in sculptural ribbed forms.
It can also lay down the glass in more complicated patterns to create forms that look as if they have been woven from the transparent material.
"The additive manufacturing of glass enables us to generate structures that are geometrically customisable and optically tunable with high spatial resolution in manufacturing," designer and researcher Oxman told Dezeen.
The machine has two compartments, with the upper chamber acting as a kiln while the lower chamber provides an area for the structures to anneal.
The "kiln cartridge" operates over 1,000 degrees Celsius and can contain enough molten glass poured into its top to build a single component.
A nozzle made from alumina zirconia silica – a chemical compound that is resistant to heat – is used to funnel the material onto a platform.
The project follows on from the Mediated Matter group's 3D-printed "wearable skins", designed to facilitate synthetic biological processes. Earlier this year, the team filled one of the structures' hollow tubes with a luminescent liquid to represent how it could host photosynthetic organisms.
Oxman said that the new glass-printing technology could allow a similar idea to occur at an architectural scale: "Our previous work explored photosynthetic wearable skins and in this project we wanted to explore the possibility of creating architectural building skins that are at once structurally sound, environmentally informed and have the potential to contain and flow media through them."
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By integrating colour into the process, the team believes that the structures could limit or control light transmission, reflection and refraction.
"We've also experimented with colour gradients and are currently considering ways in which colouration may affect environmental performance, specifically solar radiation," said Oxman. "Because we can design and print outer and inner surface textures independently (unlike glass blowing) we can control solar transmittance."
Her list of potential applications for the technology includes "aerodynamic building facades optimised for solar gain" and "geometrically customised and variable thickness lighting devices".
"Think Centre Pompidou without functional or formal partitions," Oxman said. "Instead, consider a single transparent building skin that can integrate multiple functions and can be shaped to tune its performance."
The G3DP project was created as a collaboration between the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, the Mechanical Engineering Department, the MIT Glass Lab and Wyss Institute.
Researchers include John Klein, Michael Stern, Markus Kayser, Chikara Inamura, Giorgia Franchin, Shreya Dave, James Weaver, Peter Houk and professor Neri Oxman.
The post Neri Oxman 3D prints transparent glass into sculptural structures appeared first on Dezeen.
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