The use of 3D printing in soil science is already relatively inexistent…Add to that open source technology, and experts in the field would feel completely lost.
The fact is, despite the technological advances developed over the past decades, soil science experiments evolved very slowly. Currently, the traditional way that consists in using the most suitable soil for an experiment in advance often leads to several approximations and uncontrolled parameters.
With all these uncertainties regarding the analysis of results, a team from the Université de Lorraine, INRAE in France, and Western University in Canada decided to address this issue with 3D printing in mind. By bringing open source to the soil science community, the team wanted to gain a better understanding of the studied soil parameters.
“One of the most important challenges in utilizing 3D printing techniques for soil modeling is the manufacturing of a soil structure. Until now, the most widespread method for printing porous soil structures is based on scanning a real sample via X-ray tomography, the report reads.
For such applications, a combination of specifications such as nature of the material, porosity, and location of specific substances or living organisms should be taken into account, therefore requires a specific engineering design approach.
To implement this approach, the team behind this project has been developing a software platform that enables soil scientists to create soil models according to their needs in terms of the soil structure. This software is designed for scientific research and should help promote data sharing and exchange across the international community.
“An open-source toolchain is developed using a Lua script, in the IceSL slicer, with graphical user interface to enable researchers to create and configure their digital soil models, called monoliths, without using meshing algorithms or STL files which reduce the resolution of the model. Examples of monoliths are 3D-printed in polylactic acid using fused filament fabrication technology with a layer thickness of 0.20, 0.12, and 0.08 mm. The images generated from the digital model slicing are analyzed using open-source ImageJ software to obtain information about internal geometrical shape, porosity, tortuosity, grain size distribution, and hydraulic conductivities. The results show that the developed script enables designing reproducible numerical models that imitate soil structures with defined pore and grain sizes in a range between coarse sand (from 1 mm diameter) to fine gravel (up to 12 mm diameter)”, the report notes.
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