My brother’s lab (not at MIT) has been 3D printing optically clear glass for years. They can do all sorts of shapes and figures, though I’m particularly fond of the Yoda heads. If I’m reading this article correctly, the breakthrough they made was with the temperatures they can do it at, and it’s much less to do with the novelty of 3D printing glass. So it’s much less “hey, this is amazing, nobody has ever done this before,” and far more “we did this cool thing in a new and harder way!”
Low temp has a lot of implications for spreading this technology. Being able to print complex glass shapes at low temperatures can open up all kinds of cool applications that wouldn’t be possible at high temps.
we did this cool thing
Haaa, get it? Low temps.
I’m done.
I regret not catching that myself, that’s good 😁
First time for them
https://oxman.com/projects/glass-3d-printing
Sorry for the link but it’s glass printing 4 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/mv6j9n/my_molten_glass_3d_printer_5mm_layers_and_the/
Is it inside an annealer? There’s not much techy info in these links, but cool as hell.
Great question. I just know I had seen glass printing before and maybe it’s the lower temperature or whatever that is the breakthrough but it isn’t new in practice.
#JustMITthings
This inorganic composite glass is made of inorganic materials
Department of redundancy department
250C is not low temp for 3D printing tho, noticed that in headline.
sure that is low temp for glass aber above the PLA, ABS, ASA temps i run in vorons.
They stated 250C was for annealing to final product. That’s a temperature any bog standard toaster oven or kitchen oven can do. Sadly, they said nothing I saw about actual extrusion temps.
Glass (some not all) melts at more than 1000 C I think that’s hell of a lot harder to print at than 250 C even Prusa PETG prints at that temp.
