A few weeks ago I had an idea for an odd little hobby project: solar sintering. I was inspired by this art project by Markus Kayser. It struck me that a much smaller scale project would be a novel way of 3D printing plastic objects. Fun. Using paraboloid mirrors rather than a Fresnel lens would make it quite inexpensive to build.
Part of the appeal of the idea was that there was the option of taking it in a more ambitious direction, with some difficulty. As demonstrated by Kayser, it could be scaled up to 3D print ceramic objects by melting sand into glass.
The idea was also appealing for another, somewhat more whimsical reason. I like to read about space-related technology, but I suspect that any large scale project outside Earth orbit would be economically impractical without space-based manufacturing. There's a problem of where to begin. Something like lunarcrete is a good idea (more on that later) but fabricating it would require assembling a whole factory. In contrast, a small array of mirrors capable of sintering lunar regolith could be made comparable in mass to probes currently being sent to the moon on a semi-regular basis. An idea worth considering, perhaps, or at least amusing to imagine. Call it a Lunar Industrial Module (LIM), hence the title of this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment