Printable Reef Live Rock by Glasswalker

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is an experiment I'd like to conduct in the near future.
The idea is a "Live Rock" that is fully printable. It is of course not going to be live right off the bat, but it's designed to have a very high surface area, and be very porous. It has a decent shape/profile, and has several openings into it's interior, where the "web" structure creates a high surface area, but ability for life to attach and grow in there.
I'm just starting my first saltwater reef aquarium, and so I'm months away from a stable enough ecosystem to attempt this experiment.
Some general random thoughts that relate to the experiment and/or have created the idea:
ABS in theory is reef safe plastic
3D Printing through FDM/FFF method creates textured plastic
With correct design, the part can be mostly hollow, and allow good water flow through it
High surface area throughout the body of the rock is easy with 3DP
With the model provided, the holes may allow filling the interior with coarse substrate, further improving surface area, and adding calcium buffering capabilities.
In theory over time life will begin to grow on/in this rock, and it will become just as "live" as natural live-rock. This could then support natural filtration much the same way regular live rock/sand do.
I have yet to print this, right now the design is fairly expensive to print, this is partially due to the way I've designed the structure. With some tweaking/future iterations I think I could get the cost down by a significant margin (50% or more reduction in material).
I may print it soon, but not right away, maybe I'll consider a smaller version of it as a test of how small I can reliably print the internal structures, and use that to adjust/tweak a V2 of this.
Thought I'd throw this up on thingiverse now in case someone else in the reef keeping hobby wanted to give it a shot.
Also, do NOT use PLA for this, PLA will break down under the saltwater/bacterial load in a reef tank.
Also DO NOT hold me responsible if this causes problems in your tank. As I said, it's an experiment ;)
As always, feedback & comments welcome.
And if you ever want any objects printed (such as this one) feel free to pop over to my 3d Hub at:https://www.3dhubs.com/ottawa/hubs/glasswalker
Thanks for looking!