Printable Reef Live Rock

thingiverse

This is an experiment I'm excited to conduct in the near future. The idea is a fully printable "Live Rock" that has a very high surface area and is extremely porous. While it's not going to be live right away, its design makes it perfect for life to attach and grow inside it. I'm months away from having a stable enough ecosystem to attempt this experiment in my new saltwater reef aquarium. Some general random thoughts that relate to the experiment and/or created the idea: ABS plastic is theoretically safe for reefs 3D printing through FDM/FFF creates textured plastic with unique properties With correct design, the part can be mostly hollow, allowing good water flow through it High surface area throughout the body of the rock is easily achieved with 3DP technology The model provided allows 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, making it just as "live" as natural live-rock. This could then support natural filtration much like regular live rock/sand do. I've yet to print this design, but it's currently expensive due to its complex structure. I'm confident that with some tweaking/future iterations, I can 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 internal structures, and use that to adjust/tweak a V2 of this design. Thought I'd share this on Thingiverse now in case someone else in the reef keeping hobby wants to give it a shot. Also, please don't use PLA for this, as it will break down under the saltwater/bacterial load in a reef tank. 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 Hubs at: https://www.3dhubs.com/ottawa/hubs/glasswalker Thanks for taking the time to look! How I Designed This The part was designed purely in MeshMixer using sphere shapes with deformations, then a boolean union and smoothing were applied to get an organic shape. Following that, cylinders with boolean difference carved out tunnels/caves. Another round of smoothing, followed by duplicating the part, reducing its polygon complexity to low-poly, and making a pattern to create the voronoi type pattern on the surface and interior. The original file was made hollow with 2mm walls. A smooth with a negative amount resulted in a slightly rougher appearance. Then both objects were joined together to get this result. Ultimately, it was quite quick and simple to do, resulting in a neat looking "rock" for the experiment. Things I may want to alter: More or less holes to support better flow-through and/or manage to contain substrate if needed Changing the diameter of the internal structure rods to optimize material use while maintaining surface area internally I even considered running the version without the skin. Perhaps getting the holes a little smaller, and structure smaller, as a result light could penetrate, further supporting growth of life inside the "rock". Anyway, all just ideas. For now, the proof of concept needs testing in a real reef.