World’s first 3D printed steel bridge unveiled
An Amsterdam start-up has revealed what it calls the world’s first 3D printed steel bridge at the Dutch Design Week. MX3D says the bridge is now ready to be installed at its final location in the city.
Tuesday, 23 Oct 2018 14:51 GMT
The steel bridge at MX3D’s warehouse. Photo by Thijs Wolzak courtesy of MX3D
MX3D, a manufacturing technology company, partnered with designer Joris Laarman Lab and British firm Arup as the lead engineering partner on the project. The idea for the bridge came about in 2015 when founders of MX3D wanted to use its robotic 3D metal printers to print a steel bridge. The finished bridge measures 12.2m long x 6.3m wide x 2.1m high and has been constructed using six-axis robots to control large welding machines.
Gijs van der Velden, chief executive officer and founder at MX3D, says: “After such a challenging project the MX3D team is proud to be able to invite people to use the bridge for the first time. This will help us to generate the data we need to make our designs more intelligent every time. For us the bridge is only the beginning, MX3D has and will introduce its metal printing in many more metal industries in the years to come”.
3D printing is poised to become a major player in engineering”
Amongst the long list of partners on the project, the firm is working with is the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, which will collect data from the bridge’s innovative sensor network. The data from the sensors, which will monitor bridge traffic and structural integrity as well as environmental factors, will be used to build a digital twin model of the bridge. The institute hopes the digital twin will be used validate new infrastructure designs created using robotic additive manufacturing.
Mark Girolami, Turing’s programme director for data-centric engineering, says: “3D printing is poised to become a major player in engineering, and we need to develop novel data centric approaches for testing and monitoring to realise its full potential. When we couple 3D printing with digital twin technology, we can then accelerate the infrastructure design process, ensuring that we design optimal and efficient structures with respect to environmental impact, architectural freedom and manufacturing costs.”
Using emerging technology to develop objects and a visual language of the future that is informed by logic, we aim to make small leaps in that evolutionary process”
MX3D will install the bridge on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal in the red light district of Amsterdam, once renovations are complete on the canal in mid-2019.
Joris Laarman, co-founder of MX3D and bridge designer comments: “Evolution is a truly wonderful process that we try to harness in our work. Endlessly trying, refining, improving until slowly, something emerges that is so ingenious it looks like magic if you don’t know what went on before. In our work, we try to capture some of that magic. Using emerging technology to develop objects and a visual language of the future that is informed by logic, we aim to make small leaps in that evolutionary process.”
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