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Airbus Explores Building Planes With Giant 3D Printers
Airbus Explores Building Planes*With Giant 3D Printers*- Updated With Video - Forbes
It wouldn't fucking surprise me by 2050 we're building our homes and cities this way.
Airbus Explores Building Planes*With Giant 3D Printers*- Updated With Video - Forbes
The concept plane by Airbus to be made circa 2050 with a 3D printer
[Updated with video, below] We already know that 3D-printing has revolutionized the way we can make everyday objects from Lego pieces, to guitars, and from car bodies to artificial livers. But the scale of this change could be much, much bigger if the “printers” themselves scale up enough to incorporate structures as large as airplanes.
Bastian Schaefer, a cabin engineer with Airbus, has been working for the last two years on a concept cabin that envisions what the future of flight would look like from the passenger’s perspective. From that came a radical concept: build the aircraft itself from the ground up with a 3D printer that’s very large in deed, ie. as big as an aircraft hangar. That probably sounds like a long shot, since the biggest 3D printers today are about the size of a dining table. But the Airbus design comes with a roadmap, from 3D-printing small components now, through to the plane as a whole around 2050.
Why use 3D printing at all? Airbus parent EADS has been looking into using the process, known as additive layer manufacturing, for making aircraft for some time because it’s potentially cheaper, and can result in components that are 65% ligher than with traditional manufacturing methods. Airbus’ concept plane is also so dizzyingly complicated that it requires radical manufacturing methods: from the curved fuselage to the bionic structure, to the transparent skin that gives passengers a panoramic view of the sky and clouds around them.
“It would have to be about 80 by 80 meters,” said Schaefer of the eventual, yet-to-be-created 3D printer. “This could be feasible.”
3D printing technology has been around for a while and there are plenty of innovators pushing it in extraordinary ways. Some of the biggest structures have come from Enrico Dini, the man behind British company Monolite UK, who has worked for years using 3D printing technology to mould sand and an inorganic binder into large, house-like structures. Dini has claimed that his 3D printer, known as the D-Shape, is the largest in the world.
Among the biggest challenges in scaling up 3D printing are money and regulation. Dini struggled to finance his large-scale printing projects because of the global financial crisis; his story is told in the forthcoming documentary “The Man Who Prints Houses.”
Airbus meanwhile needs its designs to pass through stringent aircraft regulations before it can use the process to make plane components. One reason to start small: by the end of this year Airbus will have updated certain cabin brackets for the A380, making its super jumbo the company’s first commercial plane to use 3D-printed components. New models of Airbus’ Eurofighter Typhoon, a military jet, already contain non-structural parts of its air-conditioning unit that have been 3D printed, Schaefer said.
It wouldn't fucking surprise me by 2050 we're building our homes and cities this way.
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