A team of tinkerers over at the McGill University in Montreal have created an eco-friendly 3D printer which uses plain water to print ice sculptures.
As profiled over on Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing, the team have successfully modified their FAB@HOME desk-based rapid prototyping machine to create fully realized 3D sculptures from ice based on commands sent to it from a PC running CAD/CAM software.
While 3D printers are nothing new – and are often used by engineers to rapidly create a physical prototype of a new part, allowing real-world tests to be carried out without the expense of having a whole production line created specifically for a handful of prototypes – the use of ice is an interesting departure from the traditional plastic, wax, or starch-based materials most commonly used in such devices.
There are certainly advantages to the use of ice in rapid prototyping: it’s hardy, it’s readily available, and it can be easily disposed of with no harm to the environment.
Equally, there are disadvantages: the items are only transitory, and the room they are printed in must be kept cool otherwise they will rapidly warm up and return to their base state – which is to say, water.
The team behind the ice-printer have already come up with some interesting ideas for the commercialization of their invention – including making use of the novelty of the idea to create “small-scale ice models [as] economic alternatives to intricate 3D models of architectural objects” for use in the ice-tourism industry. Thinking on a larger scale, the team is currently investigating whether the ice originals could be used to create moulds from which metal copies could later be cast – giving manufacturers a cheap and environmentally friendly method of trying out their ideas before having massive quantities of metal cast.
While the current ice-based FAB@HOME printer is nothing more than a custom creation, the idea of rapid prototyping in ice could take off as companies find ways of reducing their impact on the environment – although the requirement to operate the device is a chilled room to prevent premature melting could well wipe out any ecological gains from the use of water as a building material.
So far the team hasn’t announced any partnerships with makers of commercial 3D printers to bring their ice-based technology to market.
