A desktop selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printer, designed and built end-to-end as a team project at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo. Sheet-metal chassis with a folded extruded-aluminium internal skeleton, a custom dosing-and-roller powder-handling mechanism, and a vertically-actuated build platform. From sketches and CAD through to a working physical prototype.
ADI is a selective-laser-sintering 3D printer designed to fit on a workbench. The brief — set by Cátedra Louzau within the Industrial Design programme at UBA-FADU — was to develop a piece of industrial machinery from first principles: identify the function, design the mechanism, draw every part, and build a working prototype out of real sheet metal and extruded profiles.
The architecture is straightforward by intent. A folded sheet-steel exterior wraps a 20-series aluminium-extrusion internal frame. The top houses a heated powder dispenser and a roller that sweeps a uniform layer of polymer powder across a heated build bed. A galvanometer-steered laser (in the visualisation shown as the blue cone) fuses the cross-section of the part. The build platform then drops one layer-thickness and the cycle repeats. Standard SLS; the design work was in compressing it into a desktop footprint that could plausibly sit next to a Formlabs or Sinterit on the same lab bench.
Team project — Universidad de Buenos Aires (FADU), Cátedra Louzau, Tecnología IV. Developed with Matías Macca, Agustín Folino, Leandro Gallo, and Nicolás Pahor. Sheet-metal engineering drawings, mechanism design, CAD assembly, prototype fabrication and final renders by the team. Exterior surface design and visualisation by Martín Rico.
The internal mechanism follows a standard SLS cycle compressed into a desktop footprint. The animation below shows the seven discrete states — from sealed exterior idle, through bed-up, dispenser, roller, laser sintering, and bed-down — that the machine repeats once for every cross-section of the part being printed.
Designed so the user only ever interacts with the top loading bay and the front service door. Everything else stays sealed in operation — important both for thermal stability and to keep the very fine polymer powder contained.
Each frame from the cycle animation, isolated. The first two states show the exterior with the skin closed; frames three through seven cut away the housing to expose the chassis and the moving mechanism — useful for explaining the print process without losing the product's actual form factor.
The exterior was deliberately quiet. A piece of industrial machinery on a designer's or technician's desk has to disappear into the background — the work being made on it is the point, not the machine itself. So: matte black sheet-metal panels, a single visible structural radius on the right edge, a smoked-acrylic window over the active build area, and one square brand mark on the lower-left front face. Nothing else.
The two lifestyle renders below place the machine in the contexts it was designed for: a research lab and a design studio.
The course requirement that made this project unusual: a working physical prototype, not just a render. The team produced full SolidWorks engineering drawings for every sheet-metal part, had them laser-cut and folded at a local shop, assembled the aluminium-extrusion internal frame, and arrived at a poster-and-machine final delivery photographed on the floor of the studio.
The board below shows the development arc — CAD assemblies, dimensioned engineering drawings, and the physical prototype at three stages of build, ending with the final delivery alongside the project poster.
A short walkthrough of the ADI prototype — the exterior, the operator interactions (top loading, front service door), and a quick pass through the print cycle as it runs.
The reason this project gets remembered: the renders are gorgeous, but the machine actually exists. The four photographs below show the prototype as delivered — alongside the team, at the project's final review, and later on display at an exhibition where it was selected to represent the cátedra.
Some of the proportions in the physical prototype shifted slightly from the final renders (the upper hopper section in particular reads taller in person), but every major design move — the sealed exterior, the lit sintering window, the square brand mark on the lower-left, the brushed-metal accent edge on the right — made it through to the built object.
The full ADI image set, including additional process photos, detail renders, and exploded views, lives on Behance.
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