Sand castles are so passé. Imagine a sand-sculpting process that makes real products – without the water – and you’ve got the machine Markus Kayser recently tested in the Sahara Desert.

The Solar Sinter is a three-dimensional printer that uses sand as the medium and sunlight from a Fresnel lens. It’s derived from a process called selective laser sintering (SLS) – an additive manufacturing technique that uses a high-power laser to fuse small particles of plastic, metal, ceramic, glass powders into a mass that has a desired three-dimensional shape.

SLS was developed and patented by Dr. Carl Deckard at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s, under the sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA), which commissions sophisticated research for the U.S. Department of Defense

In “traditional” SLS, the laser selectively fuses powdered material by scanning cross-sections generated from a 3-D digital description of the part (for example from a CAD file or scan data) on the surface of a powder bed. After each cross-section is scanned, the powder bed is lowered by one layer thickness, a new layer of material is applied on top, and the process is repeated until the part is completed.

Kayser harnessed the Saharan sun's rays to do the work of a laser in a traditional 3D printer setup. And rather than using a resin-like substance for the additive layers of material, his device ingeniously makes use of the desert's other most plentiful resource – sand.

Kayser had been working on the process for about one year. “In August 2010 I took my first solar machine – the Sun-Cutter – to the Egyptian desert in a suitcase,” he explained. “This was a solar-powered, semi-automated low-tech laser cutter, which sunlight to drive it and directly harnessed its rays through a glass ball lens to ‘laser’-cut 2D components using a cam-guided (computer-aided manufacturing-guided) system. The Sun-Cutter produced components in thin plywood with an aesthetic quality that was a curious hybrid of machine-made and ‘nature craft,’ due to the crudeness of its mechanism and cutting beam optics, alongside variations in solar intensity due to weather fluctuations.”

 The experience of working in the desert with the Sun-Cutter inspired Kaiser to develop a machine that could heat silicia sand to melting point and then allow it to cool and solidify as glass.

“By using the sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world,” stated Kaiser.

He tested his first manually-operated solar-sintering machine in February 2011 in the Moroccan desert with encouraging results that led to the development of the larger and fully-automated computer-driven version.

The Solar-Sinter was completed in mid-May this year and, later that month, Kaiser transported the machine to the Sahara Desert near Siwa, Egypt, for a two-week testing period.  Among the results: a perfectly attractive and functional glass bowl.

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