Posted on 04/15/2016 4:39:22 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
We’ve seen 3D-printed houses before, but most make use of prefabricated chunks. This hurricane and tornado resistant hotel suite in the Philippines was printed in one shot.
Sound familiar? This is the work of [Andrey Rudenko], who started by building a concrete 3D printer in his garage 2 years ago, moved on to 3D printing his kids a concrete castle in his backyard later that year and now appears to have a full-blown company offering commercial 3D printed houses. Way to go [Andrey]!
The building was designed in Sketchup no less, and the printer makes use of Pronterface for the control software. It’s absolutely fascinating to see this built at full-scale. We want one.
The project was made possible by an eccentric entrepreneur named [Lewis Yakich], once an engineer at Intel, now a real-estate magnate in the Philippines. He enlisted the help of [Andrey] to build this new 3D printed expansion to his pre-existing Lewis Grand Hotel. But they have their sights set even higher — on manufacturing more printers and revolutionizing the low-income housing market in the Philippines.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
All in all, they expect they will be able to print a house like this in under a week, with massive cost savings compared to traditional methods.
This methodology would seem like a potentially good idea for lunar or mars construction. Of course I would expect it to be more Dome-like on the moon or mars.
You know, if they left that horizontal layered texture in the walls, a good designer could work with that. Smoothing out the concrete makes it look too utilitarian, but the horizontal lines have a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright thing going on, a little organic with slight irregularities.
Usonian Automatic is the first thing that popped into my mind when I clicked on this thread. I got to go in one many years ago that was set up at a museum.
http://www.steinerag.com/flw/Artifact%20Pages/PhRtUsonAuto.htm
About 15 years ago, I nearly bought an early 50’s U-shaped ranch with cantilevered carport and radiant floor heating, designed by a Wright protege. It needed some work but mostly cosmetic, a porch had settled and there were a few ill-advised things done over the years, nothing difficult to undo. It was long and low, using very elongated bricks with a sort of split-face rough texture. That house would work very well recreated with this 3D printed concrete.
I’m impressed, but don’t let the power go out and allow the concrete to set up in the extruder or you’ll have to throw the whole thing away.
Do they have three d printers that print three d printers?
would that be like typing google into google?
I think that is more like scratching yourself.
The video of the 3d printing was animated — fake. T
Only the very beginning. Skip to the 28-second mark.
Awesome to print interior walls like this or printing out forms in which rebar is inserted and concrete is poured. Throw a 5 axis head on this and it can spit the concrete around lathing or rebar. I’ll have to think about that....
I do not know what you are talking about. The Video was obviously not animated. It was a real-time concrete dispensing system.
“The Video was obviously not animated”
Possibly, but why didn’t they show the whole printer, namely, the mechanism that moved the printhead. It would be large. It would be very impressive. It’s amazing that it could position the printhead so precisely over the long distances. Also, I’d like to have seen how the concrete was brought to the printhead. Why would there be no narration?
When the printhead stopped printing, the concrete stream was cut off so cleanly that I have trouble believing that it’s real. Same with starting the concrete stream. Too clean.
You ask the very same questions I was asking myself. How do they feed the concrete into the print head?
Now I watched another video available on youtube regarding this exact same system, and they mentioned it took months to set up the equipment for that machine to print those rooms in a few days, so a time saving system it is not, but presumably it might potentially become.
But why do they not show us the upper part of the machine so we can get an idea of how the concrete is sourced to the printing mechanism? Is it a refillable tank? Is it pumped up to the print head on the fly?
I would be interested to know.
When the printhead stopped printing, the concrete stream was cut off so cleanly that I have trouble believing that it’s real. Same with starting the concrete stream. Too clean.
I don't think it's regular concrete. I think it's concrete mixed in such a manner that it is more akin to mortar, and probably optimized to work with their printing scheme.
Whatever is the aggregate, i'm pretty sure it's not very large. I'm wondering how they reinforce this stuff. I'm wondering if they are just printing forms, and the inner spaces will have re-bar added, and then concrete would be poured in from the top.
If this is the case, then it is probably an excessive use of materials.
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