Feb.5, 2015 | By Alec
Mars is truly an inhospitable place; lethal dust storms ravage the planet’s surface, dangerous radiation levels are commonplace while temperatures plunge to -56C all the time. And of course, there’s no oxygen to breath. Things like this make you wonder why humans are bothering to go to Mars at all, but scientists have been working on solutions for problems like this for years now.
And to help find interesting solutions, NASA recently launched the Inspiration Mars competition. While the first prize eventually went to another team, one interesting Polish project has caught our eye thanks to its interesting use of 3D printing technology: the inflatable Mars Habitat.
The project was developed by students and PhD students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Technical University of Wroclaw, who have an ongoing academic project called Space is More, which seeks to find interesting innovations to facilitate space exploration. Together with Polish 3D printing experts service providers Three Dimensions Lab, they developed an interesting solution to the simple question of: where are those astronauts supposed to live? After all, sending even a single robot to Mars is a multi-billion dollar activity, so how can this be done without bankrupting NASA?
Their solution, which managed to reach the final stage of NASA’s Inspiration Mars competition, is remarkably simple. As they explained, they’ve developed inflatable capsules that take up little space to transport, but can grow into easily expandable living capsules once they reach the planet’s surface. Furthermore, "they have been designed to fully ensure the safety and comfort of its inhabitants," said the team.
While it sounds simple, there’s just one challenging component: they should be 3D printed in metal. So how exactly does this work? Well their plans for the Mars Colony rely on creating a structure using the FiDU technique, which is short for the German ‘Freie Innen Druck Umformung’ (free inner-pressure deformation). In a nutshell, it consists of welding the edges of extremely thin metal plates together, and then inflating them with just a little pressure to form any number of preconceived shapes and objects. The result is stable and strong, yet uses very little material as the sheets can be as thin as 1 mm. The technique is still being experimented with, for instance by the Polish company Zienta, who’ve used it to make interesting furniture.
One of the competition's judges, prof. Hubbard, holding an inflated piece of metal made with FiDU techniques.
A stool made with FiDU techniques. Could this be used to build homes on Mars?
For their entry into the Inspiration Mars competition, the students from Space is More worked with 3D printing specialists Three Dimensions Lab and Rapid Troopers, a student organization from Faculty of Mechanical Engineering to create a 3D printed plastic model of a single Mars residential unit they called OutPost (at a scale of 1:10). They also experimented with the FiDU technology to back up their ambitions. Perhaps 3D metal printing could be used for very specific FiDU shapes in the future? The entry took an arduous 150 hours of printing (0.2mm layer thickness), processing and assembling, and was created on Hbot 3D and Ultimaker 3D printers.
While their entry was very well received, they ultimately did not win the competition. Undiscouraged, the Polish students have continued to expand their promising project, and have recently also presented at the IMM Cologne convention. In the coming months, they are even planning to 3D print a scale model of not just one outpost, but of an entire Mars Colony consisting of five interlocking outposts and additional areas. It will be very interesting to see how this project continues to evolve, as it definitely seems like they’ve stumbled upon a very clever solution to a large problem in space exploration.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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I saw HBOT 3D printers at the fair, well-built machine with a large working space, a very good choice for engineers
Josh wrote at 2/6/2015 10:05:32 AM:
Love it! And love it much more when I see they use Zortrax M200 :) Congratulations guys!
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