Can broken glass build a clean future
[Music]
what if there was something
in nature that could show us why and how
it’s possible to start reducing landfill
it’s now the year 2020 and
it’s even though we’re entering the most
advanced technological
decade of our human history it’s still
quite impossible
to consider a world with no landfill
and one mask asked why that is why
considering here where we stand
in nanoworld country no landfill and
sustainability
has been the norm for thousands of
generations
materials that we use in structures and
devices
and that we take for granted are all
human created
this includes things like plastic steel
and pretty much
anything else that you can think of
materials take a heck of a lot of energy
to produce
and are a big actually the biggest
strain
on our planet here you can see our earth
in its uh majestic glory and it’s
important to remember
that all the materials that we take for
granted the ingredients for them
actually come from earth and i think
it’s pretty fair to say
that the earth is a little bit fed up uh
with what’s been going on recently
in fact the biggest single users of
electricity
in new south wales victoria and
queensland
are metal producers hammering home our
silent but powerful expectations as a
society
in our expectations of what a materials
driven society
actually is our prolific use of
materials is so entrenched in the norm
of of our thinking and that’s largely
because there’s actually nobody alive on
the planet today
that hasn’t lived in a period where
materials are just thought of
as coming from a factory that
has created a mindset where it’s often
thought that there’s an infinite supply
of things in the basement of a factory
which is actually not the case and
actually just last week i heard someone
saying that anything you want
you can just get it from alibaba
so our uh the connection between our
tech driven
ambitions and the strain on the planet
is broken
and that’s a link that we now must
unbreak so how can one break the link
between
materials proliferation and the strain
on the planet
fortunately the last decade has seen
tremendous advances
that are now at a stage of advancement
where they can start to come together
there’s two particular things that i
want to concentrate on and the first of
those
is digital manufacturing in particular
additive manufacturing
otherwise known as 3d printing 3d
printing
has allowed us to start to think very
differently about
the way in which we use materials and
the type of materials that we use
in addition 3d printing is a bit more
like nature in that it
adds material instead of taking material
away to get to a final structure
so it genuinely is an additive process
secondly there’s automation and data
exchange
in manufacturing cyber physical systems
cloud computing
and the internet of things which have
rapidly accelerated in the past decade
and give us the ability to be object
oriented
advanced computing has allowed us to
help unlock
nature’s secrets with things like
generative design
and artificial intelligence being
tremendously important
i mentioned nature in those last couple
of examples
and i want to spend the rest of the the
talk today talking you through an
example
there’s been many a ted talk previously
uh discussing 3d printing and advanced
materials
so i thought i’d do something different
and talk about the greatest materials
designer ever
and that is mother nature she is very
very very smart
and also has about a billion years head
start on us all
so it’s important to pay attention to
her
what you see here is a naturally
occurring structure
known as venus’s flower basket this
structure is found
at the bottom of the pacific ocean in
the dark depths of
of at least a thousand meters below sea
level where there is no light whatsoever
and most typically this structure is
found depths
greater than 2000 meters below sea level
this structure is actually made out of
what you and i know as glass
which chemists and engineers know of as
silica
what’s really interesting about this
structure is it’s comprised in a very
unique geometry that exploits free space
and very detailed structural elements
it’s so special that uh its properties
are superior to that of steel
and in fact it’s much much more
lightweight considering what it’s been
made out of
so professor joanna eisenberg at the
weiss institute at harvard
uh has spent a big chunk of the last few
years trying to understand
this structure and she attributes the
various length scales in this structure
from nanometers right through to
millimeters and then exploiting free
space
to create structures over tens of
centimeters as holding the key to this
marvel and its phenomenal strength
what venus’s flower basket has allowed
us to do as engineers
is to challenge the way in which we
think about materials
it’s also showed us that we know very
little even though the year is 2020
but it’s also showed us the exceptional
promise that can come from
nature inspired biomimetic designs
a little bit closer to the surface of
earth
and glass is one of these materials
that’s been used for centuries
and interestingly i think it’s fair to
say that we
know very little about glass as a human
race
some things you may not know about glass
that are typified in these videos
is that when glass is very very thin or
in fine dimensions below about
20 microns so about a fifth of the
thickness of your of your hair
it can become infinitely flexible which
is really interesting because
that probably would have saved you a lot
of heartache when you were younger and
you were breaking things
the other interesting thing about glass
is when it’s in large dimensions
and you can see that video on the right
where it’s dropped from a great height
on a piece of steel
glass can actually be very tough now
tough is actually
toughness is an engineering quantity
that means the ability
to absorb energy so glass can be very
tough in large dimensions
and resist cracking so very very
interesting
uh material and i have to confess once
again that as a materials engineer we
don’t understand these properties very
well
other than knowing that they’re geometry
dependent
but then this poses the question can we
now take glass
and and use glass in a way that nature
does like venus’s flower basket
and put together geometric arrangements
that could potentially replace steel
now if you think about the way in which
we work with glass at the moment
things like glass blowing grinding and
cutting it’s certainly not going to cut
it
however welcome to 3d printing
and we crack the door open to industry
4.0
3d printing in the last decade has
really uh
had some very tremendous wins 3d
printing of polymers
and metals is now a commercial reality
and in fact companies like general
electric are using 3d printed metal
components
in aircraft bits at the moment and
companies like bmw are certainly using
3d printed polymeric components
in vehicles but 3d printing of glass has
remained at the bleeding edge and still
does
but fortunately there’s a few groups
that are giving it a red hot go
so some of the examples you see here are
from neri oxman’s group at the mit media
lab
the other one is the micron 3dp
swarovski collaboration in austria and
the one on the bottom left
is actually australia’s own but actually
canberra’s own
maple glass so what you see here
in spite of being very very hot
temperatures is actually really really
really cool
and the results are very promising so
what you see here is a selection
of things that have been uh created from
3d printing of glass
and you can see that there’s tremendous
opportunities in controlling dimensions
there’s also tremendous opportunities in
creating
infill and using free space as a design
variable as you can see in the middle
there
and that gets us one step closer to
nature
but what’s perhaps the most important is
the ability to
take a computationally generated design
turn that into a digital file and deploy
that
with great accuracy as you can see in
that example on the right
and that is is the very first important
step towards generative
design so what you see here may look
like a collection of widgets
but actually they’re not just widgets
they’re widgets full of promise
it’s no secret that australia like many
other countries is having
a a waste and a landfill crisis
our low value exports are now no longer
able to leave australia
and our systems of a circular economy
and recycling
are not yet up to the task however
next year in 2021 victoria will be one
of the first places on the world so the
state of victoria
to introduce a purple bin just for
glass recycling and glass only
so based on everything that you’ve now
learned about glass in the last four
minutes
what an opportunity and what an
opportunity this is
so just like perhaps in the jetsons
you could conceive a situation where you
have a glass printer
and in the top you could throw something
broken or something you want to discard
and crunch crunch crunch it would create
a computationally designed
value-added product with no further
strain on the planet
and no further energy implications on
the planet
and you actually see an example of that
on your right
where you can see a commodity glass
bottle that was broken
turning into something else with a
computational design
of infill and water tightness
certainly from the point of view of
materials design
we must be able to design things that
are damage resistant but when we can’t
do that
they need to be recyclable and when we
can’t do that
they we must do that and then when
required things must be recycled
absolutely no doubt that at this point
is the best hope that we have
in terms of trying to minimize the
proliferation and damage on the planet
now for those that are very astute
listeners you probably would have
realized where was the thousand degree
temperatures at the bottom of the
pacific ocean
making venus’s flower basket and it
turns out
that mother nature is always a step
ahead because venus’s flower basket
when it’s grown at the bottom of of of
the pacific ocean
is not like 3d printing where we layer
material
but it’s actually grown organically
with no light around mother nature is
able to take
parts of the sea water particularly
silicic
acid and turn that into silica so while
venus’s flower basket is on the bottom
of the pacific ocean
tethered to the ocean floor it is
actually a living creature and part of
anamalia
so there’s still a lot that we can learn
and a lot that we can learn
for bringing us one step closer to
nature
i am however optimistic because if there
was any evidence
that being one with nature was possible
it’s certainly here in australia where
the indigenous australians not only
achieved it
but they achieved it thousands of years
ago
my hope is that all of you now
young and old pay particular attention
to what things are made out of
as you now know there’s no infinite
supply of material
and there’s no trapdoor at a basement of
materials factories with an infinite
supply
my hope for the next decade is that
everything that we make
for human consumption comes from our
waste streams
the way in which we’re going to make
that possible is by leaning on industry
4.0
and advanced computation including
artificial intelligence
that will drive generative design and
help us mimic nature
much closer we have a multi-generational
and social contract with our planet and
i leave you with the message
that the future is clear so thank you
very much
and i hope you never look at a glass
bottle in the same way
[Applause]