This week’s selection is DOPPIONODO by the Polytechnic of Bari.
DOPPIONODO, in Italian, means “Double Knot”, and that precisely describes the complex structure of this sculpture.
DOPPIONODO is a large, twisted sculpture designed at the Polytechnic of Bari by Marco Massafra & Prof. Giuseppe Fallacara,and 3D printed by Concr3de. The complex, knotted structure was printed with a combination of Lecce limestone powder and recycled stone waste material.
Concr3de is a Netherlands-based company that produces large-format powder-based 3D printers. Their materials capability includes sawdust, ceramics, polymers, stainless steel, and stone dust. That was the prime material used in DOPPIONODO.
The 3D printer used in the DOPPIONODO project was Concr3de’s enormous “Elephant Gray” system, which has a build volume of 1000 x 1000 x 1000 mm. It’s a binder jet system that uses a printhead to selectively deposit binder over arbitrary powders, layer by layer.
The Elephant Gray system has a printhead with up to 720dpi resolution, and that’s sufficient to produce quite smooth surfaces, as seen above.
We don’t know exactly how this item was designed, but almost certainly a generative 3D CAD approach was used.
Via Politecnico di Bari and Concr3de
