Actually by “car” I meant something like those solar car races, or human powered flight. They don’t sell solar cars, and nobody’s really thinking they can make a large, human powered plane - yet. I’m sure we’re many generations of technology away from making a modern car out of one material.
I think so, but carbon fiber is usually used as a composite, so you need another material for the matrix. But if you consider a composite as a material, you can tune its properties by varying the amount of reinforcement. Hmm..
Yes, we can’t. We couldn’t fit 1 billion transistors in a single core in the past, either. 3D printing is still very new and already they’ve demonstrated things like living hinges and clothing. If they could somehow temper the material as it’s printed, giving a range of properties, I think a lot of the parts of a car (shock absorbers) could be built into the structure.
Many of the electrical and mechanical powerplant issues might be resolved by using external combustion, like a steam turbine. The driver would probably have to supply start-up ignition, though, like with a Zippo.
The semantic question is whether “plastic” is one material, in which case (that it is) one could use neoprene alongside hard thermoset materials (tires and rims) and plexiglas. It might be fairly simple to start with a single source resin and make subtle changes in the extrusion and/or fabrication process that would yield hugely different output properties.
Printing is slow. There are fast 2D printing methods, but 3D is like a very slow ink jet. We have one of those printers in the basement of my building. The only thing I’ve seen it make is a wrench and a bicycle chain. If the printer were big enough, it could probably print a bicycle. Smaller grooves are a problem though, because the filler material has to be washed out. When printing interlocking things like the wrench they have to use a filler to keep it in place before its finished. It also costs big money to print anything.
It’s going to be a long long time before they can print cars faster and cheaper than an assembly line.
While we’re at it on the definitions, does “steel” count as a single material? I’ve been assuming that it does, since if you drove an all-steel car into a foundry and melted it down all in one vat, you’d still have a material that was recognizably steel and still useful for at least some purposes… But there are many different alloys that are all considered steel, and which have a wide variety of properties. If nothing else, we’re going to need materials of different elasticities and hardnesses.
And just for the sake of nitpicking, it wasn’t the Professor who made the two-way radio, it was the Skipper: He remembered some old Navy training after a blow to the head. Of course, he forgot it again after another blow to the head, and the radio got broken again, before the end of the episode.
I would still seriously question this premise. What problem is having a single material solving? It doesn’t make manufacturing easier - it makes it harder, since it is unlikely to be suited to all tasks or processes that it is used in. Somehow the material would need to be both high modulus, and low modulus, both hard, and malleable, and a whole range of other properties that make it suited for different manufacturing processes. Then you get the material properties needed for different roles in the final product. Again, high and low modulus, malleability or hard, electrically and heat conducting and also electrically and heat insulating. A single material would be a nightmare to design anything complex with as you would be forever being compromised in the design, ending up with something that was heavier than it need be, more expensive, shorter life span, and generally just plain bad. The only positive attribute having a single material has is supply logistics. You only have to worry about supply of one thing.
3D printing is a very limited technology. It solves a very limited set of problems. In particular you can’t control or create the material properties in the same way as most industrial manufacturing technologies can. A forged metal part is an order of magnitude stronger than a 3D printed metal part. You can’t make any sort of useful spring (shaped like a spring doesn’t count). Surface finish is bad, and you can’t control surface hardness. Metal parts are weak and porous.
If you do want one thing, I would suggest fermions. Whilst we have very limited ability to handle and fabricate things out of raw fermions, there is some incipient ability, and it is just a matter of developing it further.
I think the point of the “single material” constraint is so that you can load your 3D printer with one sort of feedstock. So the notions about “plastic”, or different types of steel as one material miss the point. The point is to load a bunch of material X into the hopper, and out comes product Y made entirely out of X.
But that’s a pretty arbitrary limit on your 3D printer. We already have 2D printers that use multiple ink stocks, that’s how color printing works. So there’s no reasion you couldn’t load up cartridges of plastic, steel, aluminum, rubber, glass, and so on into your printer, and print using multiple types of materials. You could also have specialized heads to process a single material into two different end products, like a plastic that has certain properties when cooked to one temperature, and different properties when cooked to another temperature.
Once you’ve got a 3D printer that can print all the components to make a copy of itself, then you’ve really got something.
Not at all. Francis Vaughan was being flippant there: Protons, neutrons, and electrons are all examples of fermions, and so, in that sense, everything is already made out of fermions.
Lots of luck getting them to hold together without using any bosons, though.
[QUOTE=Francis Vaughan]
You can’t make any sort of useful spring (shaped like a spring doesn’t count).
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I wouldn’t make this assumption. Even the plastics we’ve printed have enough elasticity to make a spring. I assume that a wide variety of “inks” are available for printing. I have seen some interesting research in this. The types of materials being experimented with are not the sort of thing you are imagining. IP prevents too much discussion here though.
You can in fact, with some care, print a spring with modern 3D printer technology. I’ve done it. It doesn’t last nearly as long or work nearly as well as a spring made from spring steel, of course, but it does give the advantage of being able to make the spring and attached hardware one continuous piece.
Interestingly, 3D printers are being promoted for applications like creating engine blocks for cars. For those who don’t know, the process for making an engine block is both amazingly primitive, and incredibly sophisticated. Even after all these years, engine blocks are still sand casted. The “cores” (which define the hollow spaces in the engine) can be quite complex, and this makes fiddling with the engine design an expensive proposition. So, these guys have created a 3D printer which can print the cores used in sand casting, so one-off (or short run) engines can be made at a reasonable cost.
I think you can get your answer from the current trend of building computers, electronic devices and even car parts from a single main structural component, instead of attaching different pieces together.
Why cast an engine block as one piece, instead of using the best material for each part? The requirements for cylinder surfaces are different from the requirements for the other parts of the engine block.
Why make things out of hardenable steel, like gears, then individually heat treating and quenching the teeth? Why not weld them on? Why research ways to make certain alloys stronger, when there are stronger alloys available?
Using less types of materials simplifies manufacturing and assembly, and makes products lighter and have less points of failure.
Look at it this way: if you were a doctor, would you want a pill that can cure all diseases? I think other than the fact that they’d be out of a job, doctors (at least those interested in curing people) would say that was the ideal medicine.
Somehow you seem to be partly arguing my point, but also missing some of it.
Manufacturing steps themselves require different materials, or materials of different natures - which I am going to call the same thing. If you need a woven fabric, starting with a billet of steel is a bad idea. Steel makes bad fibres and awful fabric, and is awful to deal with. Any hard strong material is not going to be what is needed. Anything that can be made into useful fibres that can be woven is not going to have the stiffness and hardness properties needed for other components.
Some materials are almost unweldable, others are very difficult to cast, some terrible to machine. You can stamp malleable materials, but not hard or springy ones. Yet each is very good at its chosen task. Welding destroys heat treating. You can weld a hardened steel component, but it won’t be hardened anymore.
I would say it is precisely the opposite. Because you compromise the material choices, manufacturing will be harder and more expensive, and the artefacts heavier, and more failure prone. If you look at a modern car the range of materials has increased substantially over time, not decreased. The number of different alloys of steel, aluminium and magnesium is large and very carefully chosen. The number of plastics is huge. The complexity of individual components has increased - our ability to fabricate complex designs that avoids the assembly of sub-components helps - but the choice of material that the component is made of becomes all the more critical - and is one thing that drives the diversity of materials, not reduces it.
Yes, if compromises are made, products will certainly be worse. But if a material were available that could perfectly mimic the properties of other materials, maybe by treating it or diffusing things into it, wouldn’t it be better?
I don’t wish to make my yacht’s keel bulb out of carbon fibre, and I sure don’t wish to make the mast out of lead. The range of things we can do to current materials to modify their properties is reasonably limited. Mostly restricted to a few well know metals and alloys thereof. Aluminium is probably the material of widest utility. We can make a car out of mostly aluminium. But there is no technology on the planet that will make a crankshaft or pistons out of it. There are simply places where even the most advanced metallurgy won’t take you. Aluminium bearings are just not going to be viable. The most advanced planes still use steel for some components.
Let’s suppose we choose carbon as the build material - components that need to be hard and/or transparent are made of diamond (never mind how we make a whole windshield out of diamond - that’s Sneelock’s problem, not mine); parts that need to be flexible are made out of spun and woven carbon fibre, maybe bonded by graphene wrapping
Lubrication is provided by graphite, and nanotubes and buckyballs also get used somewhere in the thing.
So you’re finished with your all-carbon car and want to recycle it - it’s all one element, but it’s still not a uniform material - any technology you develop to be able to deconstruct and re-use this single-element-multi-material mix is already going to be way in advance of the problem that demands single-material builds. If you can sort and manipulate matter at the atomic level, you don’t need to be picky about what you make things out of.
