Printing bricks from moondust using the sun’s heat

Bricks have been 3-D printed out of simulated moondust using concentrated sunlight – proving in principle that future lunar colonists could one day use the same approach to build settlements on the moon.

“We took simulated lunar material and cooked it in a solar furnace,” explains materials engineer Advenit Makaya, overseeing the project for ESA.

“This was done on a 3-D printer table, to bake successive 0.1 mm layers of moondust at 1000°C. We can complete a 20 x 10 x 3 cm brick for building in around five hours.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-bricks-moondust-sun.html#jCp

 

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