3D Printed Microlattices Hold 10,000 Times own Weight

A team of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and MIT have built lightweight, micro-architected structures which demonstrate both incredible strength and amazing rigidity using a special 3D printing process. The process essentially makes use of metals, ceramics, and plastics to create objects made up of hollow tubes which can tolerate load pressures of more than 10,000 times their weight. The research team says the development could impact the manufacturing process for automotive and aerospace applications. You can read the whole story here: http://3dprint.com/42355/3d-printed-microlattices/


Below is a photo of some members of the LLNL/MIT team:
http://3dprint.com/wp-content/upload.../llnl-team.jpg

Without 3D printing, this is the type of advancement in micro-architecture wouldn't have been possible... I guess that's a tad obvious. Well, it wouldn't have been possible until nanobot technology became a reality anyway.

I wish they had chosen a different voice-over for the video. That guy's Indian accent is thicker than a Newfoundland fisherman's. :)

That is pretty amazing. It seems like 3D printing and nanotechnology might soon come together. Perhaps someday we will be printing nanobots.

And yes that accent is very heavy!

I find it thoroughly amazing that this kind of work gets funded. I'm glad, but amazed. Pure research is often ignored these days in favor of projects with more immediate applications in mind.

And I think those nanobots are already with us now...

Bucky Fuller's "octet truss" goes way back to Alexander Graham Bell's kite structures over a century ago:

http://www.moma.org/collection/objec...bject_id=82398

http://www.n55.dk/manuals/discussion...lplatform2.jpg

Most amazing was Fuller's design for a fractal octet truss down to the atomic scale which would weight almost nothing, as each strut was itself made of a yet smaller airy octet mast, and each strut of that mast was again made of yet tinier masts, and so on:

http://www.buckminster.info/Pics/Oct...tation-Chu.jpg

That Buckminster Fuller stuff was cool, NikFromNYC. Wasn't he into some other wild stuff as well? I always dug his Dymaxion car...

It just keeps getting better.

Can we say: 'super strong lightweight space craft'.
I think we can :-)