Foreword
4.0 Classic Space-Filling
4.1 Early Examples
In 1890, Giuseppe Peano discovered the first of what would be called space-filing curves:
Delving deeper into the world of mathematics, fractals, geometry, and space-filling curves.
In 1890, Giuseppe Peano discovered the first of what would be called space-filing curves:
Happy new year! We are back and had our first tutorials session today. Students are submitting their portfolio on Tuesday and have started the last brief (see all our briefs for the year here). Here are two projects which are worth sharing for the following reasons:
More beautiful projects on Tuesday evening!
We just finished our week at Grymsdyke Farm, Buckinghamshire. Ten students spent about two nights each working on their individual projects, building a 1:1 to 1:5 prototype using the available technology: a CNC Milling Machine (with RhinoCam), a laser cutter, a Z-Corp and a RepRap 3Dprinter.
DS10 would like to thank Guan Lee, Ed Grainge and Kate for their precious help and patience on the CNC, Jessie Lee and Keith McDonald for their great advices!
Below are some pictures of the week.
Above: Dhiren Patel’s “Ear Parabola” being assembled
Above: Dan Dodds testing the fiber optic cables of his Sectionned Harmonograph
Above: Emma Whitehead cutting her convection cell models out of plywood
Above: Thanasis Korras’ CNC milled components for his giant fractal building.
When researching the close packing of tetrahedrons I came across a reasonably new discovery, The Quasicrystal. Its current impact or potential impact can be gauged by the fact that Dan Shechtman, who made the finding, was this year awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
“Quasicrystals are a fascinating aspect of chemical and material science – crystals that break all the rules of being a crystal at all.”
So what is a Quasicrystal?
Basically they are formed when tetrahedra are compressed into a given volume. In Dan Shechtman’s discovery, the packing achieves an efficiency which fills 82% of space, higher than any previous effort.  The close packing of the tetrahedron forms these intricately complicated and amazingly complex structures. A normal crystal is a material structure which repeats periodically however one of the really interesting things about Quasicrystals is that they don’t actually repeat exactly, despite its regularity. Quasicrystals represent a class of solids which lack translational symmetry, but nevertheless exhibit perfect long-range order and reveal well defined fivefold rotational symmetries. Translational symmetry is when an image or object can be divided into a sequence of identical repetitions which are translated about a given vector. So without this form of symmetry the Quasicrystal is non-periodic.
Aperiodic and Penrose tiling’s can also be found within Quasicrystals which themselves can be found in medievil Islamic mosaics.
The model shown in the second image is made up of 4000 x 1cm long struts, built thanks to 3D printing!
For further information follow the link below.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/press.pdf
Following on from the tutorial yesterday where Jack talked about possibly casting his experiments with sand using a saline solution sprayed onto the forms created here are two further ways of utilising sand to create rigid structures.
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/15402/markus-kayser-solar-sinter-3d-printer.html
The first is a 3D printer which concentrates the solar energy to form glass structures from the sand the machine sits on. I know many of you have seen this before but I thought I’d post it in relation to this specific topic. The link is to designboom, a great website with daily updates from the latest innovations in architecture, art and design. Check out the link to find further information on Markus Kayser’s printer.
http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
The second is a TED lecture given by Magnus Larsson. He proposes an ambitious project to stop desertification in the Sahara by literally forming a wall across the continent using the desert sands as a bulding material.
If anyone wants to edit this post to try and embed the video from the TED lecture go ahead, I can’t get it to work with their f=video format but that may just be me.
Fast Company has published an article on printing food which talks about the Cornell Machines Lab‘s work and more specifically Jeffrey Lipton‘s group.  The latter looks at how Solid Free Form Technology (SFF) will “fundamentally change the ways we produce and experience food”. They have published a paper called “Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production” explaining the main advantages of this technique which are mainly artistic, allowing experimental Chefs to create new dishes which could not have been done before. Laypeople could print these new creations from home too.
CNN Money‘s website shows one of these machines used by the French Culinary Institute.
The Printing Food Project is part of larger group, the Fab@Home which aims to make 3D printers and other new fabrication technology affordable to everyone.
The Printer with two different eatable ink
A printer in action as shown on the CNN video at the French Culinary Institute