Liquid Metal Printing, first shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Designs for Different Futures" exhibit, is a new process for printing liquid metal within a powder support. This printing process can produce metal objects from centimeters up to meters in scale with print times ranging from seconds to minutes. This is the first printing process able to produce large metal objects within seconds to minutes that are 100% recyclable/reusable. We are able to achieve this by drawing in 3-dimensions with molten metal within a powder environment, similar to sand casting but without any molds, this process can eliminate the need for printed supports, slow sintering or low-resolution welding techniques.
Other forms of metal printing today are extremely slow (hours or days to print metal objects), expensive (hundreds of thousands of dollars for machines and hundreds to thousands of dollars for printed parts) and small-scale (millimeter to centimeter scale objects). By rapidly printing large-scale metal objects we can truly enable metal 3D printing which has been limited in scalability and feasibility for manufacturing, today. Metal makes up a significant portion of the manufactured products and components around us every day. If we are able to print faster, cheaper and more customizable, this technology can change both design and production processes in the future. We see promising applications in product design, architectural components or potentially aviation and automotive parts.
Self-Assembly Lab Team:
Zain Karsan, Kimball Kaiser, Jeremy Bilotti, Maria Esteban Casanas, Bjorn Sparrman, Schendy Kernizan, Jared Laucks & Skylar Tibbits
Emeco Collaboration:
Jaye Biuchbinder, Gregg Buchbinder
AWTC Team:
Miya Nobuhiro, Masaki Otomori
Developed as part of Zain Karsan’s Masters Thesis at MIT.
Co-Advised by Peko Hosoi & Skylar Tibbits
Original work commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago for the "Designs for Different Futures" exhibition.
