Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Plastics will require custom dies and a lot of heat?

Has a decade of home plastic 3D printers gone unnoticed by the author? Or is the production of the feeder thread something that is a lot more intensive than I'm aware of?

That is one of the things the "why not settle antarctica" folks don't get. Anarctica-the-land is under MILES of ice. Water is ice to have... but it's not useful for making things. Not that I know what martial regolith or mineral mining (low-G ... should be easier?) entails.

Google says regolith is silicon dioxide, ferric oxide, aluminum oxide calcium oxide, sulfur oxide, and there is perchlorates (toxic) as well. That sounds like a lot more usable elements than ice.

Also, I can't imagine a mars colony of some size wouldn't involve mining of phobos and deimos. Low-gravity, lots of solar power without mars's dust and atmosphere to power things. Just drop things to the surface once processed.

As a FDM printer owner, it does use quite a bit of energy. My ender 3 uses 0.125kWh[0] with 200C extrusion (PLA) and 60C bed, but making a durable children spork can take hours.

my personnal guess: by plastic mass, FDM is probably way less efficient energy wise than injection molding for the same mass of plastic, since meltic plastic a tiny volume at a time must have more losses than having a big amount heated at once.

0: https://3dsolved.com/ender-3-power-consumption/

I've got the same printer - it's great, but clearly not optimized for power consumption. The hot end could be insulated so the only loss of heat is via the melted filament - as it is, I think most of the energy that goes into the hot end is lost directly to the air. Then the heated bed is great for ease of use, but it's pretty wasteful. If power was at a premium, I'm pretty sure we'd go for other solutions to keeping the print stuck down. My making both these changes, I'd guess it would be fairly easy to reduce the power consumption by a factor of ten or so. In the end, it ought to be possible for printing to take negligible power compared to making the bioplastic filament in the first place.

You don't need a heated bed. Just some glue stick or hairspray on the build plate

>by plastic mass, FDM is probably way less efficient energy wise than injection molding for the same mass of plastic

How does it compare when you consider the energy required to manufacture small-run injection molds?

Clearly at a certain scale there must be a crossover point, and it's probably greater than 1 unit.

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