Rapidly 3D Printing Furniture with Liquid Metal
MIT researchers have developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Watch this video to learn more about their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP).
“This is a completely different direction in how we think about metal manufacturing that has some huge advantages. It has downsides, too. But most of our built world — the things around us like tables, chairs, and buildings — doesn’t need extremely high resolution. Speed and scale, and also repeatability and energy consumption, are all important metrics,” says Skylar Tibbits , associate professor in the Department of Architecture and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab, who is senior author of a paper introducing LMP.
Transcript
00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: MIT researchers have developed a new technique for rapid 3D printing with liquid metal. Using their process, they can produce furniture-sized aluminum parts in a matter of minutes. Their technique involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum then quickly hardens into a 3D structure durable enough
00:00:25 to withstand post-print machining, such as milling and boring, to construct functional furniture like tables and chairs. There are existing methods for printing with metals which are common in construction and architecture. But these printed structures can be susceptible to cracking and warping because some portions must be remelted during the printing process. This new method keeps the material molten
00:00:47 throughout the entire process, therefore avoiding some of the structural issues caused by remelting. The aluminum is held at a high temperature in a graphite crucible and is gravity-fed through a ceramic nozzle into the print bed along a preset path. They found the larger amount of aluminum they can melt, the faster the printer can go. The team chose aluminum because it is commonly used in construction and is an infinitely recyclable material. Having a machine that allows people to melt down
00:01:14 recycled aluminum and print parts, the researchers say, would be a game-changer in metal manufacturing. Their technique does sacrifice resolution for speed and scale. However, in some applications in architecture, construction, and industrial design, components of larger structures often don't require extremely fine details. It could also be utilized effectively for rapid prototyping with recycled or scrap metal. Moving forward, the researchers want to keep iterating on the machine so they
00:01:43 can enable consistent heating in the nozzle to prevent material from sticking and to achieve better control over the flow of molten material.