Hyperspectral 3D printer engineering suggestion

[monstercolorfun]

Hi everyone, I recently imagined a machine which will perhaps be used one day in various fields of research, and for the moment it's a new invention. I would love to make cash from it and to patent it and everything, except that patents are so 20th century and annoying and confusing, so I am publishing the idea.

Moon and Planetary Rovers are equipped with an infra-red laser that can focus onto a distant rock for example 9 meters away, and a camera measures the color of the light that is reflected by the rock, to see if it is made of silicon, calcium, iron, etc.

It's called a spectrometer. I want to attach a spectrometer to a 3D printer and use it as a 3D scanner. Currently they can capture about 10,000 images per second, "Spectra Per Second(SPS)". With USB3 it's possible to record about 320 SPS to a PC. They vary from hand-held spectrometers to car-sized.

Instead of the hot-end, there would be a drill bit. Next to the drill bit, there would be an IR light, and a sensor that can measure the reflected spectra, and a fan that blows the dust into a mound far away from the IR measurements. The robot would simply dig slices into anything and measure it's chemistry very precisely, i'd hope 0.01mm precision.

What's the use of the robot?

-If you were an archeologist and you wanted to dig up a dinosaur, the robot could automatically dig into the ground and it could detect the sulphur inside the rocks which made up the outside of the dinosaur, and make a map of all the scales and horns of the dinosaur, and perhaps even detect it's colors, the face, and as soon as it detects calcium, it knows it has found a piece of bone, so the robot digs around the bones and saves a lot of time and work to the scientists. Instead of throwing away all the dust from the cave of Denisova, they could have scanned it and graphed the entire chemistry of the cave, and found evidence of footprints, hearths, and if they used it on a Neanderthal burial, they could see what kind of clothes he was buried in and see wooden artifacts, and braids of hair. I think that archeologists should hurry and use this technology.

-If you were a 3D modeller, you could take a very complex shape like a skull or a plant, encase it in soft cement, and set the 3D printer to destroy and measure the skull and return a 3D print of it in submillimeter detail, including the highly complex ridges and grooves that exist in nature, that a 3D scanner would have trouble with.

One of the interesting things about the robot is that it couldn't dig cubic trenches into dig sites with dinosaurs in it, it would have to dig octohedron-lattice landscapes, which would be pretty fun.

[curious aardvark]

Umm, yes.
Good for you - now go actually make something :-)

Oh bugger, I just can't leave it there.

-If you were a 3D modeller, you could take a very complex shape like a skull or a plant, encase it in soft cement, and set the 3D printer to destroy and measure the skull and return a 3D print of it in submillimeter detail, including the highly complex ridges and grooves that exist in nature, that a 3D scanner would have trouble with.

Would it not be simpler to just scan the object with the ir laser thingummy attached to a printer.
Why encase it in cement first - does not compute.

Hi everyone, I recently imagined a machine which will perhaps be used one day in various fields of research, and for the moment it's a new invention.

No it isn't, it's an extremely tenuous concept currently existing only in your head.

Now were you to make something, write the code to drive the laser and ir sensor, calibrate the machine against the many thousands of substances it would need to identify and prove it worked - then it would be an actual invention.

Not saying it's not a good idea. But it is just an idea.

[monstercolorfun]

Umm, yes.
Good for you - now go actually make something :-)

Oh bugger, I just can't leave it there.

Would it not be simpler to just scan the object with the ir laser thingummy attached to a printer.
Why encase it in cement first - does not compute.

No it isn't, it's an extremely tenuous concept currently existing only in your head.

Now were you to make something, write the code to drive the laser and ir sensor, calibrate the machine against the many thousands of substances it would need to identify and prove it worked - then it would be an actual invention.

Not saying it's not a good idea. But it is just an idea.

Thanks, I am grateful for some criticism about which elements of the invention are not possible...

I have researched current hardware to check if all the basic components of the invention already exist... So that all that is left to do is combine existing technologies.

Mass spectrometry can make decent analyses of objects 20-50 micrograms, and every analysis takes 17 nanoseconds or something very fast. Even if the returned graphs could only detect carbon, silicon, iron and oxygen levels, that would be amazing, to have a graph of 4 elements in voxel format. Actually a 10k spectrometer could return good results for 10-20 elements, calibration of the laser is only to have an extra 10% precision for results.

It's a project for a robotics lab at a university. I don't have 10k or a spectrometer to use on it.

Portable 10 kilo mass spectrometers by far exceed the precision necessary to make a good graph of a 2d surface. The idea is just to have Gcode that drills an object into slices using a diamond drill or even just a vibrating plastic one depending on precarity of the substrate. Then takes 100ds of measurements every mm2 of every slice. Currently, when they dig up human burial sites from old caves, they want to know the clothing and jewelry and objects that were at the burial... they brush the dust into jiffy bags and search for artifacts. it's very necessary to see if the invention can graph everything and search for braids, clothes and so on, because then the evidence of the site is lost for future generations.

The idea about encasing a skull in cement is logical, because if you divide something into paper thin slices and scan it with a spectrometer,some pieces would fall off when they were held in place by higher up structures. The support material could be anything that was drillable and different in composition from the scanned object. I think it's a kind of imaging device that will exist one day.

This is the image of a single 1067nm infra red laser on a stone.

2016-02-03_211036.jpg

[monstercolorfun]

This kind of proves that it's possible:


http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac2032707

http://www.imaging-git.com/news/3d-n...rface-analysis

https://ww2.chemistry.gatech.edu/~bims/

[Davo]

I'm sorry; what does this have to do with 3D printing, other than moving in three dimensions?

[monstercolorfun]

I'm sorry; what does this have to do with 3D printing, other than moving in three dimensions?

I'm sorry, is that positivism?

its inspired by built with and based on 3d printer parts, made possible by 3d printer industry in most ways.

perhaps ask the same thing to all those that have developed laser nozzle replacements on the forum, what is it to do with 3d printers? Just didnt feel like keeping the idea to myself if i think the wold would benefit from it, is that wrong of me?

[curious aardvark]

well technically - if it were ever made and it actually worked.
It would be a sort of 3d scanner - albeit a 3d scanner that destroys the object being 'scanned'.

Not sure how the world would benefit - other than having a lot less stuff to find pesky storage spaces for in museums :-)