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3D Printed Supersized Titanium Bugs

3D printing and scanning have both already been proved to be excellent additions to museums’ toolboxes. With projects such as bringing dinosaurs and other great extinct animals such as mammoths back to life, the new tech has simultaneously also raised the contemporary angle of the institutions’ profiles. Today’s story is another example of 3D printing & animals, but instead of giant mammals it’s about giant insects.

Bugs from the Australian National Insect Collection have been given a more unusual treatment — they have been super-sized and 3D printed in titanium — but not so much to potentially creep out visitors or even to give entomologists an easier way to study the insects, barely visible to the human eye unless under a microscope. The primary motivation and application involved the super-sized bugs being created to serve as pieces of art in a national art exhibition. CSIRO Science Art Fellow, Eleanor Gates-Stuart, explained the thought process as an evolving one: “We combined science and art to engage the public and through the process we’ve discovered that 3D printing could be the way of the future for studying these creatures.”

3D Printed Supersized Titanium Bugs

The manufacturing process takes around 10 hours, ending up with up to 12 3D printed titanium bugs from a single batch. Using the expensive machinery for just building bugs isn’t likely to remain as the raison d’être for the 3D printers, as can be interpreted from between the lines of CSIRO’s Additive Manufacturing Operations Manager Chad Henry: “Giant bug production is not necessarily where we saw ourselves going, however, this project is exciting because it brings together two key areas of science – manufacturing and entomology”.

Source & Image Credit: CSIRO