Glass: an old material for the future of manufacturing
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Glass: an old material for the future of manufacturing Susanne Klein1, Fraser Dickin1, Guy Adams1, Steve Simske2 1 HP Labs, Long Down Avenue, Bristol BS34 8QZ, UK 2 HP Labs, 3404 E Harmony Rd, Ft. Collins, Colorado, 80528-9544, USA ABSTRACT Traditional assembly line manufacturing is speculative, costly and environmentally unsustainable. It is speculative because it commits substantial resources—energy, materials, shipping, handling, stocking and displaying—without a guaranteed sale. It is costly because each of these resources—material, process, people and place—involves expense not encountered when a product is manufactured at the time of sale. It is environmentally unsustainable because, no matter how much recycling is done, not using the resources unless actually needed is always a better path. Three-dimensional printing is currently of great commercial interest as it can be employed to manufacture parts on-demand economically and without the significant cost & environmental downsides, i.e. inventory and waste, associated with traditional manufacturing processes. Herein, we describe the formulation of a novel water-based material which can be used in a traditional 3D printer extrusion process to create optically transparent glass-based objects. Such objects have a wide range of applications including, but not wholly limited to: security printing using color & coating effects, protective films and coatings, electronic codes readable by smartphones, tablets or touch screens. Additional all glass objects traditionally manufactured by the so called kiln glass method can be generated by this type of 3D printing making it interesting for the high end market of art objects.
INTRODUCTION Even after 30 years, the 3D printer market is still a niche market for prototyping and the major obstacle inhibiting its market expansion is the limited number of materials which can be printed and printed together. At present, 3D printing is mostly based on organic materials such as ABS plastics or UV curable monomers. The functionality of the printed objects is constrained by that of the underlying material, e.g. most printed plastic parts are not robust enough to withstand daily usage. Consequently, the main application of 3D printing has been prototyping, and as such it has not yet reached additive manufacturing. To transform 3D printing into a viable method for additive manufacturing, it is necessary to expand the material choice. The Ragnarok (Research on Advancing Glass & Nonorganic Applications to Recreate Objects & Kinetics) project in HP Labs is targeting the more obvious of the replaceable manufacturing processes using 3D printing methods. Casting, molding and sintering are the first three processes receiving our attention. We identified glass as a promising material for additive manufacturing. Glass is a silicabased material and with 90% of the Earth’s crust composed of silicate minerals there is no shortage of silica resources. Glass is easy to recycle and is environmental friendly. With regards to health and safety, inhali
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