If you’ve ever been to Amsterdam, you know there are plenty of canals and, therefore, plenty of bridges. Next year, a unique pedestrian bridge in the old city center will go into service. The stainless steel bridge will be 3D printed and also embed a number of sensors that will collect data that the printer — MX3D — and their partners Autodesk, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Studies, hope will help produce better 3D printed structures in the future. The bridge will cross the Oudezijds Achterburgwal which is near the city’s infamous red light district.
Since the bridge matches exactly with the model used to print it, scientists hope to be able to map the sensor data to a virtual twin of the bridge very easily. You can see a few videos about the bridge’s construction below. This month, during Dutch Design Week, visitors had a chance to walk across the bridge to generate some of the first live datasets.
If you own a 3D printer, you know how a lot of cool things take a long time to print. This bridge took 6 months, 1,100 km of wire and 4,500 kg of steel. You can imagine telling a friend, “We checked on the print and the filament jammed back in March.”
We’ve seen MX3D before, most recently printing bicycles. If you want to build tiny bridges, you can always use Technic.