Not sure if this is supposed to be a marketing plug or generate discussion?

Either way, the company would’ve been better off making a blog posting and posting HQ images of what they can do. The images on the site kind of suck and you have to go digging

OP here; I am not associated with this people in any way and wanted to create discussion.

I think the problem was that you editorialized the title, and it sounded like marketing ("Glassomer – glass structuring is becoming as easy and fast as plastic processing"). A better approach would be to make the title reflect what the page actually says, and then to post a first comment explaining what you find interesting and what sort of discussion you were hoping for.

So the website is pretty crappy at giving a simple summary. Nature's video is better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBMB4FNoYz4

TL;DW: they sell glass powder that's mixed with a polymer binder. You can buy it as a liquid or solid. It can be cut/machined as a solid, cast or 3d printed as a liquid, and there's versions that set from liquid to solid with UV exposure. Final processing in a kiln burns away the binder and melds the glass powder together, forming the final object.

I suspect that the glass powder will quickly wear through machining tools and 3d printer nozzles. So I'm not sold on this actually being economical.

Nozzles are fairly cheap.

Diamond coated tools are not that expensive either.

They also have the ugliest logo.

Not a great link for HN, but I was surprised to learn they have a process for 3D printing glass objects using photo curing. Sounds neat.

I would imagine that burning off the polymer binder in the final processing step leads to significant volume change and porosity, which would be a major challenge in many applications. I'm not seeing any information about how they approach these problems.

See the publications of Frederik Kotz: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=TQBKvzsAAAAJ&hl=de

Citing from the Nature publication:

"The shrinkage of the part during the sintering process is isotropic and dependent on the solid loading (hence can be ­calculated; see Supplementary Information). The sintering shrinkage for stereo- lithography and microstereolithography does not depend on the scale of the sintered parts (for example, the honeywell structure in Fig. 1a with a solid loading of 37.5 vol% showed the expected linear shrinkage of 27.88% in height from 3.05 mm to 2.2 mm and width from 2.177 cm to 1.57 cm)."

"During a final sintering step at 1,300 °C the density of the brown part is increased (ρ final = 2.2 g cm −3 ) to that of high-quality fused silica glass with no remaining porosity and no cracks."

But of course these processes could be quite sensitive to hard to control parameters.

If they can reliably get those densities and shrinkages from this procedure that is quite impressive. After a brief look through the papers, there is some promising evidence but I'd like to see a more thorough characterization, especially demonstrating spatial homogeneity of porosity and shrinkage.

It's certainly a very interesting technology, and I think it could potentially be applicable to materials beyond glass.

> I think it could potentially be applicable to materials beyond glass.

It's been used for quite a few years already. Precious metal clay is basically this. You can 3d print with it, then fire it and it turns into solid metal.

What's most interesting to me is subtractive manufacturing of ceramics.

From what I've seen in metals, there's a preference for powder bed technologies over binder technologies. But it's not like I have a wide scope of current industry or research.

Wow this looks promising, wonder if the technique can be used to cheaply prototype optics. Stratasys has VeroClear but material properties aren’t ideal (e.g., lack of heat resistance), and injection molding is rather expensive for making a bunch of one-off prototypes.

This is very cool - it looks like you have a substance that looks and feels a bit like ceramic clay -- but when fired, it becomes true silica glass!

Very nice!

If I'd known about this last year ago it would have been a serious contender for the shell of a photonic processor.

I'll definitely keep this production technique in mind for future projects. Shaped & machined glass is really useful.

The thermal expansion coefficient seems pretty good - I wonder if this could be used for making lab glassware? Lab glass with complex shapes (think condensers, soxhlet, etc) can get very expensive

I was just thinking that it might be useful for making lab glassware. Often you have complex shapes which takes a master scientific glass blower to make. 3D printing would make that a lot more accessible.

In case anyone is wondering it takes years to become proficient as a scientific glass blower and the wages totally suck. Used to be scientific glass blowers would up and quit and open a neon shop because it paid better.

A more interesting part is here:

https://www.glassomer.com/index.php/technology

3D printing glass, hmmmm.

Dumping us on the home page isn't really news, especially when there is basically no 'about' information there.

Even the tech page is 2 screens long with only 3 paragraphs, and I can't find any news articles about them in the last 6 months.

So it's a feedstock for very high resolution 3d printing, cured by UV to set it and then annealed in an oven to fuse it properly?

Especially the links at the bottom.

You can get 3d printing filament with a mixture of like 80% metal powder and the rest PLA that can be sintered, ie heated to be like 1200-1300C, to end up with a metal object that's essentialy printed on a regular 3d printer. Maybe glass powder could also just be mixed in melted PLA and then extruded to get a filament that could be used in regular 3d printers and then sintered to get a glass object.

It'd be interesting if they could create some sort of laminated or reinforced plastic by also printing a PLA scaffold. It'd reduce the amount of plastic but also combat some of the brittleness you get with glass.

Interesting thought but temperatures of 1300 Degree Celcius are reached. Maybe something like high temperature mineral wool would work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_wool#Kaowool

Only the shaping takes place at low temperatures. The material still needs a heat treatment at well over 1000°C for its final form.

> The conversion takes place at 700 °C below the temperature for handling of silica melts (~2000 °C) and thus safes [sic] a considerable amount of energy.

https://www.glassomer.com/index.php/technology

Is glass dust sintering really so special? Hasn't SLS printing been done for a while now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering

Ceramics and glasses are typically very sensitive to thermal gradients, so it's difficult to produce parts with SLS/SLM without cracking. This method is more common with ductile plastics and metals, and for structural application is still a WIP,

This is closer to a binder-jetting method, but a binder-glass composite can also be used for subtractive manufacturing which is typically very challenging with ceramics due to cracking.

SLS typically works with plastic not glass.

This is plastic that has glass dust in it. The plastic burns away during sintering.

How does it compare with other materials from end-of-life and waste / recycling standpoint?

> Meet our competent team of scientists, technicians and entrepreneurs. We have competent solutions for your needs.

Maybe a thesaurus?

This looks like an overextended version of something similar to "A competent team, with competent solutions." Which, well, still doesn't sound very convincing to me, but at least it flows better.