Airbus Explores Building Planes With Giant 3D Printers – Updated With Video

15 january 2013

[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.

 

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.

Another challenge is in incorporating the right materials. This Airbus concept plane’s bionic structure requires materials that aren’t available yet, such as strong-yet-transparent aluminum for the fuselage, certain biopolymers and other materials strengthened by carbon nano tubes.

But here is where 3D printers come in again. There is said to be just one 3D printer in the world that can print with multiple materials at the same time, made by a private Israeli company called Objet.  David Benjamin, a partner at New York architecture firm The Living, says multi-material printers like Objet’s can allow designers to experiment with different materials.

“You can dial in the different elasticity properties of an object, different color properties, or a continuous piece of material that has different properties over the piece,” said Benjamin, who held sample, translucent slabs of plastic that were flexible in certain parts, and which had been created with customized Autodesk software and a 3D printer.  “Certain parts of an airplane may need to be strong and flexible,” he said, and a 3D printer could create a single object that was “strong just where it needed to be strong, or light where it needed to be light.”