Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Cool! 3D Printing In The Geosciences

Geological  Fabrication Laboratory!.. Yes.. the future is already here.

and it is run by Franciszek Hasiuk of Iowa State University. He explains in a short note in GSA Today just why 3 dimensional  printing is so useful especially in the geosciences:

In the geosciences, we struggle with a fundamental problem—we love nature, but its aspects can be truly enormous or fantastically miniscule, very far away or exceedingly rare. Our burden is to overcome these conditions and communicate effectively about nature. With equal ease, 3-D printing can make hand-samples out of subduction zones and foraminifera, Martian topography, and seismic data.

Such models are immediately useful because much of what we need to communicate concerns shape and form (Fig. 1). For these purposes, we can produce inexpensive teaching models on demand, saving acquisition costs while bringing unique specimens to broader audiences. Three-dimensional printing makes the natural specimen the starting point. Digital models can be transformed (e.g., scaled, mirrored, distorted) by an instructor or a student to explore concepts like morphology, vertical exaggeration, or strain. With a little CAD work, we can make flexible fossils to more effectively communicate how organisms, extinct and extant, locomote.

Students might more easily develop a sense of scale from a touchable topography—that they themselves choose and print—that combines local elevation data showing natural and human features. By printing in multiple colors, geological attributes (like geologic formations or geophysical measurements) can be printed over elevation data as a way to better understand a new field area or check field results.


There is more about the applications of 3D printing in understanding rock pore networks with applications in the oil industry this Science Daily article.

Fascinating..

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