Solar-powered 3D printer creates glass objects by melting sand

Not many people would voluntarily choose the world’s second largest desert as the location to test out some new experiments. However, industrial designer and inventor Markus Kayser chose the Sahara desert for its abundance of sand and sun, providing both the energy and raw materials needed for his ambitious projects.

Kayser carried his first invention, called the Sun Cutter, to the Egyptian desert in a suitcase. This solar-powered machine is a semi-automated low-tech laser cutter. It uses the energy of the sun for power. The sun’s rays reflect through a glass ball lens to create a “laser” cutter that cuts 2D pieces of material using a system guided by a camera. It cuts through thin plywood to make rough and unfinished-looking cuts, which Kayser turned into some hipster-looking “sunglasses,” seen below.

Kayser’s time spent in the desert working on the Sun Cutter gave him an idea for his next project, the Solar Sinter. The sun is a huge source of potential energy, and the sand in deserts “give an unlimited supply of silica in the form of quartz.” The inventor took those two things into considering while working with the Sun Cutter, and came up with the idea to create a new machine that could use both the sand and the sun.

Although it’s not a new discovery, Silica sand, when heated to melting point and then cooled, turns into glass. The process is known as sintering and relates to heating a powdery substance and converting it into a solid form. It’s been a big part of

The Sun Sinter uses the sun’s rays in lieu of a laser, and sand in lieu of the materials mentioned above. Kayser tested his first manually-operated solar-sintering machine in February 2011 in the Moroccan desert. He then built a larger and fully-automated computer-driven version which was completed in mid-May. He tested it in the Sahara desert near Siwa, Egypt for two weeks, creating the video you see below

Kayser envisions the Sun Sinter as a “new solar-powered production tool of great potential.” You can see the machine etching various shapes into the sand to produce a product like the bowl shown above. At the end of the video, we see Kayser “cleaning up” his materials, which literally just means dumping the excess sand back into the desert.