For the past several years, the world has turned its excitement toward the practical implications of 3D printing. Working firearms, houses, and even human tissue have been printed with this groundbreaking technology. However, a new phenomenon has overtaken the 3D craze with the same kind of unlimited potential.
Researchers at The Self-Assembly Lab at MIT are currently developing 4D printing. This new technology intends to take material at a bimolecular level and using nanotechnology, program physical material to self-construct. 4D printing combines rigid materials like plastic, polymers, and wood with new “smart” material configured by a printer to have changeable properties. It can grow and adapt on it own!
Whereas 3D printing creates constant, solid shapes and gadgets, 4D would allow for changing and self-developing ones. The practical applications of 4D printing are innumerable, as basically, any industry could put it to use, replacing hard laborers with graduates from CAD colleges.
Autodesk Promotes Collaboration
Skylar Tibbits, MIT researcher, and architect collaborated with Autodesk’s Project Cyborg last year to create a 4D installation. It featured a spiral using “smart” material that, depending on how hard or soft participants shook it, would produce furniture-sized objects. As Autodesk explains, Project Cyborg “provides elastic cloud-based computation in a web-based CAD shell for services such as modeling, simulation, and multi-objective design optimization.” Essentially, it provides a meta-sharing platform for researchers and students with CAD training to share concepts about everything from nanoparticle design to human scale self-assembly.
This smart material would also use power not generated from electricity. At a nanoscale, the material could be programmed to perform its own computer functions.
Construction Sites in Space
In a recent TED Talk, Tibbits discussed how this self-assembling technology can be used to build a full scale, working structures in areas where construction is too expensive, dangerous or complicated. With Project Cyborg’s help, Tibbits’ shape changing material may one day be used in everything from infrastructure to space exploration – more specifically, creating working structures that build themselves on other planets. Check out this video to hear Tibbits explain it himself:
Adaptive Infrastructure for Practical Use
Tibbits used the analogy of water pipes in modern infrastructure as the opposite of what his smart technology is capable of doing. Naturally, pipes today are solid, allowing specific amounts of water to pass through them at any given time. With Tibbits’ smart material, however, the elasticity of a pipe’s width can be programmed to expand and contract, easing the flow of water. Potentially, this could all but eradicate the threat of burst pipes in home and city infrastructure.
Both 3D and 4D printing offer an exciting peek into the future for students in CAD design courses, although both technologies are still very much in their infancy. One can only wonder how far these new designs and technologies will take humankind even within the short time span of a few years.
What do you think would be the most exciting application of “smart” 4D technology?
