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    ESA > Television > 2017 > 03 > 3D-printing moondust bricks with focused solar heat
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    3D-printing moondust bricks with focused solar heat

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    • Title 3D-printing moondust bricks with focused solar heat
    • Released: 30/03/2017
    • Length 00:00:53
    • Language English
    • Footage Type Close-up
    • Copyright Video copyrights: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO ; Music copyright: Future Perfect 4 by David O'Brien, audionetwork.com
    • Description

      Bricks have been 3D printed out of simulated moondust using concentrated sunlight. This ESA project took place at the DLR German Aerospace Center facility in Cologne, with a 3D printer table attached to a solar furnace, baking successive 0.1 mm layers of moondust at a temperature of 1000°C. A 20 x 10 x 3 cm brick for building can be completed in around five hours. DLR Cologne’s solar furnace has two working setups: as a baseline, it uses 147 curved mirror facets to focus either actual sunlight into a high temperature beam, employed to melt together the grains of regolith. But this mode is weather dependent, so a solar simulator was subsequently employed as well – based on an array of xenon lamps more typically found in cinema projectors.

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    • Activity Technology
    • Keywords 3D printing, Creative Commons, Moon

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