3D-Printed 'Schwarzite': Building Material of the Future?

Schwarzites, named after German scientist Hermann Schwarz, who predicted the structures in the 1880s, are mathematical marvels that feature a minimum of surface and maximum of space. Rice University  engineers are using 3D printers to turn these structures, which until now existed primarily in theory, into strong, light, and durable materials with complex, repeating patterns. The porous structures are designed with computer algorithms and use as little material possible and still provide strength and compressibility. The efforts at Rice University may someday lead to nanoscale electronic devices, catalysts, and battery components, and on the macroscale could become high-load-bearing, impact-resistant components for buildings, cars, and aircraft. It may eventually be possible, the researchers say, to print an entire building as one schwarzite 'brick.'

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] [Music] [Applause] the way we manufacture ping is not the best way to do it so now there's a huge interest now to make things in additive manufacturing and that's how 3d printing comes in so these structures were predicting more than 100 years ago but you couldn't be able to make them until

00:00:34 the advent of a 3d printer so we got some collaborators from Brazil they did some molecular dynamics for this structure predict their mechanical properties and then confirm what shows I'd say more than 100 years ago so the question was how can you make them in a 3d way you know how can you make them like big structures which you can use for different types of application for

00:01:01 instance you know if you want to use this and as your structural member in a concrete or something like that one so our friends from the Brazil they did for us the molecular dynamics and then we took those we took the images from their model them on a 3d printer and then we were able to print them and then print them with a very simple polymer and after that we go and do mechanical tests

00:01:26 like compressive test and impact test and we find that these are this structure has a high load bearing and they are very light and actually we can do several tests and we can for example stand up it and see that it doesn't break and as you can see nothing happen to this structure they cancel it a lot of weight our work opened new perspectives for engineered material the

00:01:55 excitement for for this structure come from you know when you look at it first of all they're beautiful you love them a cute thing about this structure is a very light weight compared to what you will have for instance if you print the same cubic structure without destroy sites morphology you will find out the weight is double what I'm holding in my hands

00:02:18 and kind of like you know that's what we've been trying to push as much as possible to try and make as many as possible of these type of structures [Music]