Re:Glassomer: Glass shaping at room temperature
by blix on Thursday June 18, 2020 @04:37PM
(#23567728)
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.
Re:Glassomer: Glass shaping at room temperature
by jlokier on Thursday June 18, 2020 @05:04PM
(#23568031)
> 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.
Re:Glassomer: Glass shaping at room temperature
by blix on Thursday June 18, 2020 @05:21PM
(#23568175)
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.
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.