3D Printing Nature Materials
A team at ERDC is studying how 3D-printing can create geometrically complex structures needed to mimic nature. Watch this video to see the team turn a waste material into a valuable resource and help the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reach its goal to beneficially use 70 percent of dredged material by the year 2030.
Transcript
00:00:00 [Music] nature is the ultimate designer and incorporating nature inspired designs into Coastal infrastructure can provide maximum resilience as well as economic environmental and social benefits however doing so has been difficult because of constraints in traditional Manufacturing rapid advancements in additive
00:00:33 manufacturing and pioneering research by the US army engineer research and development center or Eric have opened new possibilities looking to capitalize a team at Eric is studying how 3D printing can create geometrically complex structures needed to mimic nature as an added firsttime Innovation this engineering with nature or ew project beneficially uses dredged
00:00:58 material as feed stock for the printer in the environmental laboratory we've been looking at added manufacturing for the past 5 years to understand the health and safety of potential ultrafine emissions as well as printing structures that can potentially remove contaminants from water but the innovation of this particular engineering with nature project is that we noticed that a lot of
00:01:21 the habitat infrastructure that's deployed in the environment are very simple geometries like cylinders and cubes we felt that additive manufacturer ing can add Innovation and nature inspired design to a lot of these structures that could better serve our coastlines uh the Army Corps of Engineers in the nation you are able to print more complex geometries with 3D
00:01:43 printing and added manufacturing it allows you to do things that traditional manufacturing subtractive manufacturing doesn't allow you to do and so you can get these very complex structures that look more nature inspired such as with the mangrove roots or other habitats such as bird nests that aren't traditionally available with sub act to manufacturing what's really fascinating
00:02:02 about 3D printing added manufacturing is there's a myriad of opportunities here to integrate this into nature and provide uh ecological benefits uh and also social and economic benefits and some of those targeted uh benefits that we're pursuing is habitat restoration where we can actually take this material and improve habitat that may be um degraded or destroyed the
00:02:29 chief of Engineers has a goal to increase our beneficial use of dredge material from 30% to 70% by the year 2030 it became clear to us that we could start using sediment as a resource to create a paradigm shift from it's a waste material that needs to be disposed of to a clean environmental resource that can be used on site on demand where it's needed to 3D print nature inspired
00:02:58 design for Coastal resilience habitat restoration and habitat creation we have a long history of Toxicology expertise with the environmental lab and we know the vast majority of these judge materials are clean and the little bit that isn't that has some contamination in it through our methods we're working on developing ways to sequest this cross-disciplinary effort
00:03:19 benefits from the expertise of multiple ertic Laboratories the environmental laboratory is leading the project in its conception and studying the features and geometries most relevant for 3D printing as habitat and the coastal and hydraulics laboratory will perform hydrodynamic modeling of the resulting structures meanwhile the project also benefits from the additive manufacturing
00:03:43 expertise from both the geotechnical and structures laboratory and the construction engineering research laboratory researchers from these labs are applying knowledge to explore the possibility of large format prints using dredged material directly in the field large form in general is just like smaller scale printing or at least our facility here um where you deposit a
00:04:07 layer but we can do it much bigger and that gives us the capability to manufacture much larger Parts faster than you could do it with traditional manufacturing and it gives us a lot more freedom in the designs that we can do so we wouldn't be able to produce the parts that we would want to that are nature inspired with traditional manufacturing but we can do it with additives we've
00:04:25 spent a lot of time in recent years uh using a lot of like military engineering projects that are focused on uh what we call manufacturing at the point of need so being able to to produce something there as close as possible to where it's actually being needed instead of it's like a factory and then shipping it out but being able to take that and then putting that there like say on a Shor
00:04:43 side um and then pulling dredge material from that running it through some like robotic system or whatever and actually being able to print there on site would be massively beneficial for a whole lot of reasons as this research begins to explore the use of additive manufacturing to print nature inspired infrastructure using natural feed Stock Building Materials erck hosted a
00:05:03 workshop with government industry and Academia in February 2024 to Foster further collaboration and Spark innovative ideas the workshop included a diverse group of subject matter experts in the fields of Material Science toxicology ecology mechanical engineering chemical engineering landscape architecture social science and dredging technology what excites me
00:05:27 the most about this new project where they're looking at print 3D printing dredge material is it's really taking advantage of everything that we think about when it comes to injuring with nature the opportunity to use local materials use our principles of engineering to sort of improve the performance of both ecosystem and you know ensuring safety of the coastline
00:05:46 and doing that in a way that you know contributes back to the ecosystem that's really exciting it's this really beautiful opportunity for advancing and processing you know manufacturing Material Science and the ecosystem in which we work in what exites me the most about bioinspired architecture and uh bioderived materials is that nature has spent about a billion
00:06:10 years optimizing structure uh humans have only been around doing technology for well not a billion years so we get to really learn from nature and how to make better structures this Workshop brings people from of different backgrounds and interests all together and we get to work collaboratively so to solve the problems that need to be solved that we've identified what's
00:06:37 extremely exciting is it seems like we're only limited by our own imagination uh so one of the things that we're targeting in this uh project is actually bringing subject matter experts together to hopefully Inspire each other and Inspire some designs to use 3D printing to uh improve all these things that we're talking about [Music]