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Frame from Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter Project Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter Project

Allan
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 5 times, 2017–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN references it as prior art whenever solar sintering, sand printing or sunlight-based manufacturing comes up.

Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project video shows a machine in the desert using sunlight and sand to 3D print glass objects. It is a short demonstration of desert manufacturing from renewable energy and local material.

5 citations · Demos

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@mmjaa Nov 2017 Cites it
on HN thread The World Is Running Out of Sand
Seems like an opportunity to use sun and sand to construct 3D-printing oases in the middle of nowhere. [this video] Wonder why this isn't working out as the "new construction technique" hit success that it seems, with a little optimisation, it could be?
Sand 3D printing with sunlight
@qikInNdOutReply Oct 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Solar Metal Smelter
Read more
In an old game of mine, there was a monastry driving on wheels through the dessert. The monks spend there days collecting sunlight, smelting sand into "glasstrees", which would then use daylight to collect water (silica gel), pump it up at night (using optic fibres for transport, salt water for storing heat, glass wool for isolation and distills to re-capture the nightly water vapors).. creating a ecosystem in its shade. Nearly all of it made from glas. While the premise might be idiotic scifantasy, the idea to terraform in situ with what you got, is quite neat. [link] [this video] Solar Sintering by Markus Kayser Just imagine this driving around on mars, with huge halftransparent balloons over it, which like a parabolic mirror pre-collects the light, printing structures for future ecology with the little light that world offers from the material at hand.
Solar sintering of sand into structures
@Log_out_ Aug 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Show HN: Homemade automated solar concentrator
You can also sinter sand into 3d structures. [this video] In theory if you could manufacture lenses and optical fibers, you could 3d print active solar powered structures anywhere where there is enough sun. Imagine a 3d printed little bottlegarden, with a water collector using a heated silicagel cycle printed in situ on mars. Still low atmospheric pressure, but warm and wetter.
Sintering sand into 3d structures with sunlight
@mitthrowaway2 Aug 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Lunar soil machine developed to build bricks using sunlight
It's probably something similar in concept to Markus Kayser's solar sinterer[1], but with the light being focused onto an optical fiber bundle whose endpoint is moved around in X and Y, rather than moving a basket of regolith. [1] [this video]
Prior art for sunlight-based sintering

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