Glass is brittle and breaks easily. We are reminded of this quite frequently — when was the last time your water glass broke? Or, the supposedly unbreakable glass on your smartphone? Well, be prepared for a shock, because glass may soon replace concrete in bricks. Time to freak out? Probably not. A study made by MIT engineers confirms that glass bricks can be almost as strong as concrete ones. Not only that but no mortar is required, as these glass bricks function similarly to LEGOs. Yup, this makes building glass brick walls way easier.
But perhaps most impressively, these bricks can be produced using currently available 3D-printing tech. The Glass 3D Printer 3 (G3DP3) was custom-made for printing molten glass by MIT spinoff Evenline. The printer is connected to a furnace that melts recycled glass bottles. Oh, yes, any glass will do — you don’t need exotic glass like Corning Gorilla Glass here. Predictably, the glass bricks can be remelted and used again, even the broken ones. This fact also makes the new technology exciting from a sustainability standpoint, because global cement manufacturing accounts for 8% of carbon emissions.
You must be now thinking that the interlocking pegs might be a point of failure, and you’d be right. But the engineers thought of that and placed a different material in between to prevent scratches or cracks. The design of the bricks is also quite unusual, with a figure-eight design. Still, there is a reason for that: “With the figure-eight shape, we can constrain the bricks while also assembling them into walls that have some curvature,” lead author Daniel Massimino said.
The glass bricks showed similar strength to concrete bricks under a hydraulic press, but only when combined with a separate material for the interlocking elements. Crucially, the team has built a curved wall of interlocking glass bricks to showcase the technology and aims to wow us with progressively bigger, self-supporting structures.
“We have more understanding of what the material’s limits are, and how to scale,” said Michael Stern, founder and director of Evenline, former MIT graduate student, and researcher in MIT’s Media Lab and Lincoln Laboratory. “We’re thinking of stepping stones to buildings, and want to start with something like a pavilion — a temporary structure that humans can interact with, and that you could then reconfigure into a second design. And you could imagine that these blocks could go through a lot of lives.”
Article & image source MIT News
