
Glassomer: Glass shaping at room temperature - lucioperca
https://www.glassomer.com/
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cududa
Not sure if this is supposed to be a marketing plug or generate discussion?

Either way, the company would’ve been better off making a blog posting and
posting HQ images of what they can do. The images on the site kind of suck and
you have to go digging

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lucioperca
OP here; I am not associated with this people in any way and wanted to create
discussion.

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dang
I think the problem was that you editorialized the title, and it sounded like
marketing ("Glassomer – glass structuring is becoming as easy and fast as
plastic processing"). A better approach would be to make the title reflect
what the page actually says, and then to post a first comment explaining what
you find interesting and what sort of discussion you were hoping for.

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jasonwatkinspdx
So the website is pretty crappy at giving a simple summary. Nature's video is
better:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBMB4FNoYz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBMB4FNoYz4)

TL;DW: they sell glass powder that's mixed with a polymer binder. You can buy
it as a liquid or solid. It can be cut/machined as a solid, cast or 3d printed
as a liquid, and there's versions that set from liquid to solid with UV
exposure. Final processing in a kiln burns away the binder and melds the glass
powder together, forming the final object.

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skykooler
I suspect that the glass powder will quickly wear through machining tools and
3d printer nozzles. So I'm not sold on this actually being economical.

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ericb
Nozzles are fairly cheap.

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lucioperca
Diamond coated tools are not that expensive either.

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dougmwne
Not a great link for HN, but I was surprised to learn they have a process for
3D printing glass objects using photo curing. Sounds neat.

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blix
I would imagine that burning off the polymer binder in the final processing
step leads to significant volume change and porosity, which would be a major
challenge in many applications. I'm not seeing any information about how they
approach these problems.

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lucioperca
See the publications of Frederik Kotz:
[https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=TQBKvzsAAAAJ&hl=de](https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=TQBKvzsAAAAJ&hl=de)

Citing from the Nature publication:

"The shrinkage of the part during the sintering process is isotropic and
dependent on the solid loading (hence can be ­calculated; see Supplementary
Information). The sintering shrinkage for stereo- lithography and
microstereolithography does not depend on the scale of the sintered parts (for
example, the honeywell structure in Fig. 1a with a solid loading of 37.5 vol%
showed the expected linear shrinkage of 27.88% in height from 3.05 mm to 2.2
mm and width from 2.177 cm to 1.57 cm)."

"During a final sintering step at 1,300 °C the density of the brown part is
increased (ρ final = 2.2 g cm −3 ) to that of high-quality fused silica glass
with no remaining porosity and no cracks."

But of course these processes could be quite sensitive to hard to control
parameters.

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blix
If they can reliably get those densities and shrinkages from this procedure
that is quite impressive. After a brief look through the papers, there is some
promising evidence but I'd like to see a more thorough characterization,
especially demonstrating spatial homogeneity of porosity and shrinkage.

It's certainly a very interesting technology, and I think it could potentially
be applicable to materials beyond glass.

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jlokier
> I think it could potentially be applicable to materials beyond glass.

It's been used for quite a few years already. Precious metal clay is basically
this. You can 3d print with it, then fire it and it turns into solid metal.

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blix
What's most interesting to me is subtractive manufacturing of ceramics.

From what I've seen in metals, there's a preference for powder bed
technologies over binder technologies. But it's not like I have a wide scope
of current industry or research.

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yutopia
Wow this looks promising, wonder if the technique can be used to cheaply
prototype optics. Stratasys has VeroClear but material properties aren’t ideal
(e.g., lack of heat resistance), and injection molding is rather expensive for
making a bunch of one-off prototypes.

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etaioinshrdlu
This is very cool - it looks like you have a substance that looks and feels a
bit like ceramic clay -- but when fired, it becomes true silica glass!

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jlokier
Very nice!

If I'd known about this last year ago it would have been a serious contender
for the shell of a photonic processor.

I'll definitely keep this production technique in mind for future projects.
Shaped & machined glass is really useful.

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voldacar
The thermal expansion coefficient seems pretty good - I wonder if this could
be used for making lab glassware? Lab glass with complex shapes (think
condensers, soxhlet, etc) can get _very_ expensive

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Gibbon1
I was just thinking that it might be useful for making lab glassware. Often
you have complex shapes which takes a master scientific glass blower to make.
3D printing would make that a lot more accessible.

In case anyone is wondering it takes years to become proficient as a
scientific glass blower and the wages totally suck. Used to be scientific
glass blowers would up and quit and open a neon shop because it paid better.

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d_silin
A more interesting part is here:

[https://www.glassomer.com/index.php/technology](https://www.glassomer.com/index.php/technology)

3D printing glass, hmmmm.

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hinkley
Dumping us on the home page isn't really news, especially when there is
basically no 'about' information there.

Even the tech page is 2 screens long with only 3 paragraphs, and I can't find
any news articles about them in the last 6 months.

So it's a feedstock for very high resolution 3d printing, cured by UV to set
it and then annealed in an oven to fuse it properly?

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macrolime
You can get 3d printing filament with a mixture of like 80% metal powder and
the rest PLA that can be sintered, ie heated to be like 1200-1300C, to end up
with a metal object that's essentialy printed on a regular 3d printer. Maybe
glass powder could also just be mixed in melted PLA and then extruded to get a
filament that could be used in regular 3d printers and then sintered to get a
glass object.

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jszymborski
It'd be interesting if they could create some sort of laminated or reinforced
plastic by also printing a PLA scaffold. It'd reduce the amount of plastic but
also combat some of the brittleness you get with glass.

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_Microft
Only the shaping takes place at low temperatures. The material still needs a
heat treatment at well over 1000°C for its final form.

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abdullahkhalids
> The conversion takes place at 700 °C below the temperature for handling of
> silica melts (~2000 °C) and thus safes [sic] a considerable amount of
> energy.

[https://www.glassomer.com/index.php/technology](https://www.glassomer.com/index.php/technology)

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ebg13
Is glass dust sintering really so special? Hasn't SLS printing been done for a
while now?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering)

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IshKebab
SLS typically works with plastic not glass.

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ebg13
This is plastic that has glass dust in it. The plastic burns away during
sintering.

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Gravityloss
How does it compare with other materials from end-of-life and waste /
recycling standpoint?

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robertlagrant
> Meet our competent team of scientists, technicians and entrepreneurs. We
> have competent solutions for your needs.

Maybe a thesaurus?

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singingboyo
This looks like an overextended version of something similar to "A competent
team, with competent solutions." Which, well, still doesn't sound very
convincing to me, but at least it flows better.

