Posted on 02/28/2015 12:24:24 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Concrete is an amazing building material: cheap to create, strong when used correctly, and hard-wearing, too. But turning it into exotic and shapely forms can be prohibitively complex and expensive. Now, a 3D printer capable of producing one-off moulds as large as a phone booth could help turn architectural dreamw into affordable reality.
The Engineer reports that a collaboration between 3Dealise, a 3D engineering company, and Bruil, a construction company, has spawned the new device. The pair claim that the machine—pictured below—can "create irregularly curved surfaces, lightweight half-open mesh or honeycomb structures, and even ornamental craftwork."
The printer is used to create moulds from CAD designs, which are then coated to allow the concrete to separate from them with ease. Then, concrete is poured in, along with any reinforcement; Bruil, for instance, has already created concrete segments using its fibre-reinforced concrete, which allows the structures to bear more weight than its vanilla counterpart. The moulds are weak enough to be removed with pressurised water.
Roland Stapper, from 3Dealise, compares the process to the ancient technique of casting metals in sand:
'Normally, metal is cast in sand - it is a process that has been used for around 4,000 years. Using our printer we are essentially recreating this process, minus a step. As well as concrete, we can cast iron, steel, bronzes and so forth, and we are now looking at how to cast plastics and also rubbers - anything that you can pour, really.'
The resulting blocks can be specially designed to slot together—a little like Lego bricks—allowing them to create much larger, intricate structures. Brace yourself for concrete architecture that's just a little less brutalist.
What is a phone booth?
The thing that used to make me $900 to $30,000 a day.
The difficulty with any new building development is getting the This-is-the-way-its-always-been-done guy in the Building Department to sign off on it. Seriously. It MUST meet code. By definition that means nothing new...ever.
The headline is a little screwy. 3-D Printers don’t really make design any easier. They should have used the word fabrication.
So what they’re actually doing is making big molds. I fail to be much impressed.
LOL! Exactly
I agree. If they were 3D printing the concrete itself, I'd really be impressed.
There have been computer guided cranes doing that for decades...or at least the technology was there. A crane would pour fast drying concrete in concentric rounds ot the wall layout. One dried before the next was applied...very quick. May have been brought down by building codes, or just generally not cost effective.
I think there was an article (posted here) some time back where they actually did that - 3D concrete printing...China?
Not the whole structure/house, but main parts of it.
The only plus I see here is that molds can be produced with undercuts and the like that cannot easily be made by regular injection-molding processes.
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