Autodesk and NASA Develop Building Materials for Space
Emily Pollock posted on August 17, 2018 |
“Jersey barriers” 3D printed as part of a collaboration between NASA and Autodesk. (Image courtesy of Autodesk.)
Autodesk and NASA have paired up to develop 3D printing techniques that might one day be used to print Martian buildings from rock and dust on the planet’s surface.
One of the problems for anyone looking to build in space is that there’s a weight limit on the building materials, since launching anything into orbit is incredibly expensive. To overcome these limitations, the team chose to work with regolith, a composite material made of broken rock and dust. There’s regolith on Earth, the Moon, and other planetary bodies. To make the material malleable and printable, the team added waste plastics.
“The material is made of high basalt soil and polymer,” said Abhishek Trivedi,Autodesk’s consulting business development executive, in a company blog post. “That means it takes away the problem that comes with usage of water with Portland cement concrete, such as curing requirements, shrinkage, etc. Also, the material can be heated to just the right viscosity to enable complex, free-form design. That means you can create complex overhangs, domes, projection, roofing, etc., without needing any scaffold or supporting structure.”
To test its regolith-based ink, the team has been making Jersey barriers, a kind of modular barricade used to…