[LINK] A cloudless day, a load of sand and ...

[David Boxall]

Making things out of glass might not be terribly practical, but 
harnessing the sun as the fuser in 3D printing holds interesting 
possibilities.

<http://markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/>
Solar Sinter
2011

In August 2010 I took my first solar machine - the Sun-Cutter - to the 
Egyptian desert in a suitcase. This was a solar-powered, semi-automated 
low-tech laser cutter, that used the power of the sun to drive it and 
directly harnessed its rays through a glass ball lens to ‘laser’ cut 2D 
components using a cam-guided system. The Sun-Cutter produced components 
in thin plywood with an aesthetic quality that was a curious hybrid of 
machine-made and “nature craft” due to the crudeness of its mechanism 
and cutting beam optics, alongside variations in solar intensity due to 
weather fluctuations.

In the deserts of the world two elements dominate - sun and sand. The 
former offers a vast energy source of huge potential, the latter an 
almost unlimited supply of silica in the form of quartz. The experience 
of working in the desert with the Sun-Cutter led me directly to the idea 
of a new machine that could bring together these two elements. Silicia 
sand when heated to melting point and allowed to cool solidifies as 
glass. This process of converting a powdery substance via a heating 
process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years 
become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or 
SLS (selective laser sintering). These 3D printers use laser technology 
to create very precise 3D objects from a variety of powdered plastics, 
resins and metals - the objects being the exact physical counterparts of 
the computer-drawn 3D designs inputted by the designer. By using the 
sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the 
basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process 
for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and 
sand to be found in the deserts of the world.

My first manually-operated solar-sintering machine was tested in 
February 2011 in the Moroccan desert with encouraging results that led 
to the development of the current larger and fully-automated computer 
driven version - the Solar-Sinter. The Solar-Sinter was completed in 
mid-May and later that month I took this experimental machine to the 
Sahara desert near Siwa, Egypt, for a two week testing period. The 
machine and the results of these first experiments presented here 
represent the initial significant steps towards what I envisage as a new 
solar-powered production tool of great potential.

-- 
David Boxall                    |  When a distinguished but elderly
                                |  scientist states that something is
http://david.boxall.id.au       |  possible, he is almost certainly
                                |  right. When he states that
                                |  something is impossible, he is
                                |  very probably wrong.
                                                  --Arthur C. Clarke