Massive 3D printer shows future of green manufacturing
This is said to be the world’s biggest 3D printer and it’s building a house in Maine. The prototype is made entirely with bio based materials. The hope is that the printer could help with greener manufacturing while slashing production times on this particular machine. Really is not just a printer, it’s really you could think of it as a hybrid manufacturing cell. The printer dubs the factory of the future. 1.0 is designed to help address a shortage of homes and construction workers in the US. Printing dwellings in days that could be installed within hours. The prototype is called Biohome 3D. The floors, walls and roof in the 600 square foot home, all 3D printed, are made from waste wood fibers and bio resins. Habib Daga is the director of the Advanced Structures and Composite Center at the University of Maine. Our goal was to put it through, if you wish it spaces, put it out there in a in a in a challenging main winner. And we’ve seen already 2 challenging main winners has done extremely well. And of course we’ve done a lot of material testing ahead of that for years to produce to make sure it’s going to work. But there’s nothing like getting it all out there and then monitoring that the performance. And so we’re comfortable enough right now to to scale up and do a neighborhood and that’s where we’re heading next. That neighborhood will have nine homes for people experiencing or at risk of facing homelessness. Dagger believes a facility like this could cut production time in other fields too. Imagine a day where you have a design of a boat that’s particular to yourself and and and then you e-mail those designs to to a facility like this and they can produce a vessel like this in in days versus versus months or years. So and that’s that’s a possibility we we we produced about a 25 foot vessel three years ago in about 3 days and and we’re in the process right now of producing A50 foot vessel, 51 1/2 foot vessel that we would be putting in the water here within a year.