3D-printed pottery

  • CategoryFor fun
  • Project dateSummer 2022
  • Skills requiredRhino, Grasshopper, robotic manipulation

About this project

During my internship at the University of Melbourne, I got to use their one-of-a-kind clay 3D printer. (There are a few other printers around the world which print concrete, but to my knowledge this is the only one that prints clay.)

First, I created a path for the tool to follow in Rhino. Then, using a Grasshopper script, I could control the speed and layer height, among other factors which control the robot.

After packing clay into a tube and sealing it with an O-ring, the machine is able to deposit a steady stream of clay. The lead screw pushes up a ram into the clay, extruding it. Then the robot pick and place arm follows the path set out while extruding, spiraling upwards to create layers.

This isn’t the first time I’ve worked with ceramics; in January 2022, I took an intro pottery class at MIT, and found that turning bowls is way more difficult than it looks. But this is the first time I’ve made something ceramic where though the entire piece fuses together as one, it isn’t made as one smooth piece. As such, I had to worry about the materials expanding in odd ways, which was very interesting.

After the pieces were fired, here is what they looked like! They turned grey-ish because of the firing process we selected, which was faster, but different methods would yield different colors of pottery.

Overall, I thought it was a really unique experience to try out clay printing!