Design of Alternatives to Stained Glass with Open-source Distributed Additive Manufacturing for Energy Efficiency and Economic Savings

Stained glass has played important roles in heritage building construction, however, conventional techniques of fabricating it have become economically prohibitive due to both capital costs and energy inefficiency. To overcome these challenges, this study provides a new design methodology for customized 3D printed polycarbonate (PC)-based stained-glass window alternatives using a fully open-source toolchain and methodology. This procedure involves fabricating an additional insert made of (i) a PC substrate and (ii) custom geometries directly 3-D printed on the substrate with PC-based 3D printing feedstock (iii) to be painted after the 3D printing process. This alternative is intended to be used instead of traditional stained glass or, better, in addition to conventional windows to provide stained-glass design patterns while improving thermal insulation. Three approaches are developed and demonstrated in this study to generate customized painted stained-glass designs using (i) online-retrieved 3D and 2D designs; (ii) custom designs, i.e., hand-drawn and digital-drawn images; and (iii) AI-generated designs. The proposed methodology shows potential for distributed and accessible applications in the building and heritage sectors, especially for the repair and replication of existing conventional stained glass and the design of new customizable products that are 50 times less expensive than traditional stained glass.