complicated things.

Two posts in one day. I am on a roll. It’s funny how you suddenly feel the urge to do stuff (like updating your blog) you never bother doing in your spare time, but when you really should be doing something else you just have to let people know about some useless thing you made last semester.

At our school we have this Rapid Prototyping machine. It’s simply put a machine that prints out physical three-dimensional models in 3d. It might sound like science fiction, but it uses a laser to burn out layers upon layers of a special type of powder and thereby slowly building up the physical model. This makes it able to produce any shape that one can think of. (Yes, you could even make those little cute ships inside a bottle-thingies.) The downside is it’s really expensive to use. A small model easily costs a couple of thousand NOK, and that’s after the 70% discount students get in comparison to commercial clients.

When I got the opportunity to make a RP-model for free in my Advanced Mechanics course I of course decided to make good use of this opportunity and make something I couldn’t have made without the RP-machine. Inspired by mathematical models like the Moebius strip and helped by the discovery of an awesome little 3d-modeling program called TopMod I set out to make an “impossible” shape. The aim was to make a complex object that only had one continuous surface. The picture below shows the step-by-step creation of the object:

The next step was to test the strength of the object, and make the object as material-efficient as possible.

Each of the five spirals were connected to their neighbouring spirals, making the center of the object hollow. This meant all forces had to be transferred through these connections, and to make these as slim as possible different variations were tested out.

Finally, the shape was smoothed, and a little inset line was added to emphasize the continuous loop.

Here are some photos of the physical RP-model. As you can see, it’s actually quite sturdy. But totally useless of course

For some more pictures and a detailed description in Norwegian, HERE is the A2-poster I made for my presentation at school.