3D Printing: The Revolution in Personalized Manufacturing
3D Printing THE REVOLUTION IN PERSONALIZED MANUFACTURING MELISSA KOCH TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BOOKS MINNEAPOLIS
INTRODUCTION WASPS DO IT The rhythmic buzzing and continuous oozing of a 3D three dimensional printer can draw a crowd Hypnotized everyone watches as the printer deposits small bits of material layer upon layer on a platform until slowly a new object emerges Ready to use 3D printing may sound like science fiction There’s a reason for that 3D printing has been a star of science fiction in television and film For example the technology appeared in scenes in Star Trek the popular 1960s TV series Later in the 1980s TV show Star Trek The Next Generation the 3D printer was named the Replicator In this series crew members on the Starship Enterprise could order up and print anything they wanted Viewers wished they had their own Replicators to make pizza and banana splits In the twenty-first century MakerBot even named its popular 3D printer Replicator We humans began actually experimenting with 3D printing in the 1980s This style of printing is also known as additive manufacturing because it adds materials layer upon layer to create a 3D object But humans were not the first to develop 3D printing Wasps were additive manufacturers long before us The method paper wasps use to build their homes reveals the basics of 3D printing
HUMAN WASP ENGINEERS Wasps live in nests in communities called colonies A queen wasp starts a colony by building a nest She uses her mandibles appendages near the mouth to scrape wood pulp from trees fence posts and even cardboard into her mouth Mixed with her saliva these materials become a watery pulp The queen finds a good location for building the nest She spits out the pulp layer by layer to create hexagonal six-sided cells in which her young will develop As the number of wasps in the colony grows the new generations of worker wasps construct new cells the same way the queen did In 2012 an engineering team in Italy known as the World’s Advanced Saving Project WASP closely watched wasps specifically the mud dauber wasp at work The human WASP team decided to build 3D printers to mimic the wasps technique The WASP engineers collect large chunks of clay sand plant and other soil materials and put them into a custom-made 20-foot-tall 6-meter 3D printer to print a house layer by layer The house cost almost nothing to print because the nontraditional building materials are gathered at the site The team creates these homes at locations where typical building materials bricks stones and wood are inaccessible or too costly to use for homes and other buildings Wasps build the hexagonal cells of their colonies in layers Inspired by this natural technology human entrepreneurs have modeled 3D printing techniques to build houses and other structures layer by layer WASPSDOIT 5
