MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Engineers 3D print sturdy glass bricks for building structures
- The interlocking bricks, which can be repurposed many times over, can withstand similar pressures as their concrete counterparts.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News
Publication Date: September 20, 2024
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What if construction materials could be put together and taken apart as easily as LEGO bricks? Such reconfigurable masonry would be disassembled at the end of a building’s lifetime and reassembled into a new structure, in a sustainable cycle that could supply generations of buildings using the same physical building blocks.
That’s the idea behind circular construction, which aims to reuse and repurpose a building’s materials whenever possible, to minimize the manufacturing of new materials and reduce the construction industry’s “embodied carbon,” which refers to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with every process throughout a building’s construction, from manufacturing to demolition.
Now MIT engineers, motivated by circular construction’s eco potential, are developing a new kind of reconfigurable masonry made from 3D-printed, recycled glass. Using a custom 3D glass printing technology provided by MIT spinoff Evenline, the team has made strong, multilayered glass bricks, each in the shape of a figure eight, that are designed to interlock, much like LEGO bricks.
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As a fat old white guy injineer with a 7 year old boy, I will quibble that Lego blocks are easy to assemble and disassemble. Not withstanding this critique, I find this very interesting. Almost as good as that African handy fella making buildings out of soda bottles filled with water and mud. Or the other fellow who made indoor daylights from water filled soda bottles.
I was taught that “engineers turn interesting ideas into something valuable and useable.
Sounds like these people at MIT have a winner.
Very impressive.
I look forward to the practical use of these new (fangled) “bricks”.
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