Why 3D Printing Buildings Leads to Problems

3D

printing

an entire house, computer files automatically translated into physical objects, even large-scale houses made of concrete, manufacturing

buildings

like this promises to easily and faithfully convert digital designs into real physical structures. In the world, this sounds like a dream, except that there are quite a few challenges that get in the way and, frankly,

buildings

made like this look a little strange, but companies around the world are trying to solve these

problems

by competing to make the process seamless. scalable, affordable, sustainable and acceptable to people who would simply prefer to live in a more traditional looking house.

Your next guest launched a 3D printed house business to combat the affordability crisis. His company Quist 3D completed the first owner-occupied printed home in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 2021 and its success could revolutionize everything, changing the way we design and manufacture buildings forever. The pace of innovation in the construction industry is unbearably slow. When compared to other industries such as automobiles or digital technologies such as phones or computers, for example, this slow pace is generally attributed to the complexity of constructing buildings where each site is unique and then combining them. With the way the trades and building product manufacturers work together or not, the building construction industry simply cannot be vertically integrated like those more agile industries, automobiles and phones that sell thousands or millions of units that make make unique and technologically advanced manufacturing solutions much more plausible.

Obstacles have spawned countless promising innovations over the years. Elon Musk revolutionized the automotive industry, including space flights, but his construction projects have repeatedly failed, but 3D

printing

houses promise CR in all these challenges. It works by using a large computer-controlled gantry or the robot machine's precision motors control movement and X, Y and Z coordinates, while depositing a special concrete mix, placing a series of layers on top of each other. over and over again until the building is complete and in some ways this is similar to how a brick house might be made, but instead of a human layer of bricks performing the repetitive task of laying each module of bricks, this robot simply repeatedly adds layers of a much finer mixture.

Bricks and grout are replaced with cement and aggregates. I use this analogy between bricks and 3D printing. Challenge and I'll keep coming back to that because bricks have certain limitations, for example you can only stack bricks on top of themselves or on top of other things, if there isn't a brick underneath to hold the next one it just falls over and you can. To make openings and walls using only bricks, you have to use a bob, usually made of steel or concrete, to be able to pass over the void and then transfer the loads to the ground, and 3D printing has similar limitations, only wet concrete can be stacked on top of other wet concrete or something else and, like The Brick House, 3D printing openings are a challenge, you may have to place something to hold the layers that would otherwise just float in the air and then a as the layers build up and heal over time. the whole thing could be strong enough to pass through the opening or it could just leave the steel member there like a pot of lentils.

Those limitations aren't a big deal. There is something that bricks can do that 3D printed buildings cannot and that is. make a closed 90° outside corner, it is difficult to stop and start the flow of concrete cleanly, it always leaves this mark, so to keep the flow continuous, you must round the outside corners and hide the times when the flow stops and the hide inside. of the thickness of the wall That's where no one will see it and that's why all the examples of 3D printed houses have those curved shapes that flow out, that's just one of the ways this new construction technology will change the design and the way we configure our buildings, but to understand all the other ways we must look at the various stages of the design and construction process that this offers.

It begins on the computer where the architect designs the rooms on the largest scale. This can be quite similar to a traditional process. house using the usual relationships between bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens, but the details are very different and even at this early stage the designer needs to be able to understand the limitations of the machines and building materials to ensure that the shapes being The model being modeled on the computer can be translated once the design is complete. The file goes through a program that translates all the surfaces of the digital model into a series of instructions that the printer can follow.

This includes when, where and how quickly everything needs to be. Moving this can be used to drive simulators that will detect any potential

problems

and then also offer estimates on how long the project will take if everything works. We can start setting up everything on the site. The 3D printer is brought to the site in pieces. a truck, everything is modular so no part is bigger than what easily fits in the bed of a truck, once everything is there it can take about a day to set up the machinery, the gantry starts with the blocks of foundation that must be as level as possible and from there everything is erected, shimmed and then screwed into place.

It's critical that everything is perfectly square and level or the machines could jam or deposit materials in a way that disrupts the final product and simply doesn't look right. I think this is an important issue in evaluating the overall promise and limitations of 3D printed construction and it has to do with the idea of ​​Tolerance: different parts of buildings operate within a variety of tolerance levels, that's the word which is used to describe acceptable variability. of dimensions for a building component, for example, it is entirely acceptable for a brick wall to be 20mm from where it is drawn on the architect's drawings.

It's okay for the wall to be 20mm too far this way or this way, it's just the nature of How we build things in an imperfect world there is a discrepancy between where the perfect place for it is and where it can actually be and when humans They are rebuilding the building over time and in parts. It's relatively easy to compensate within the build process and mask those things. imperfections with moldings or other materials that are easier to work with or have finer tolerances, but computers and robots still do not operate within the same acceptable tolerance ranges, they have a harder time adjusting to real-world imperfections in concrete .

The preferred material of 3D printing requires a lot of tolerance for standard construction practices. A concrete wall can be 2.5mm from where it is supposed to be and still be considered in the right place to a computer without this tolerance calculated at 25mm. It means disaster Despite that challenge, one of the advantages of doing this whole process right is that it only takes about three or four people, about 24 or 48 hours, to complete the impression of an entire house. Compare this to laying bricks, for example, you might take. I don't know, a couple of weeks for a human to place 8 to 10,000 bricks in a typical house and, like 2 bricks, the concrete cover is just one component, although of many within the entire building, it should complement this infrastructure with other things like window units and factory work and plumbing and electrical built-ins and things like that, this is again where the challenge of tolerance arises in the rest of the construction industry, which adapts to a certain way of building things that leaves smooth, straight, sleek locations for things like cabinets and windows to enter When trying to fit a perfectly extruded aluminum window into a lumpy concrete opening leaves a fairly significant gap between the two, this must be filled with something that is generally not the most durable or clean looking solution, so how the 3D works is detailed.

Printed concrete meets these other elements, it can be a real challenge, but if we go back to the printing itself, it all comes down to this concrete being extruded through a nozzle. There is a lot of chemistry and physics at play here which ultimately deters whether the final house. Whether it's a lumpy mess or adorned with smooth, sleek surfaces, you have the concrete itself, which is actually a very special mix of it. Critical factors, such as how well it flows through the system and how strong it is, depend on the precise mixing of just a few ingredients, these are the cement or binder, the aggregate or material you are bonding, and any additional ingredients. which are generally called advertising mixes and these impact things like drying time or ductility of the material.

All these ingredients are for trade. with ranges within which its use becomes an asset or a liability, for example, larger aggregate material can be printed faster and larger, thicker rocks actually ensure that there is better bonding between the printed layers. This is actually the most important factor in determining the overall strength of the house in the end, but if the aggregate is too large, it will clog the grout, so you want to get the sizes large enough without being too large and ad mixes. They help balance things like constructability, workability, and extrudability. Fly ash is actually the main advertising mix for high-performance 3D printing concrete, it allows the concrete to remain at the optimal point of workability for a longer period and actually makes the whole more durable in the end. ; however, large amounts of fly ash can cause slower development. of strength and buildability, so it is often mixed with other things like clay to retain the stability of the form while everything sets.

This concrete passes through a head and also has a significant impact on how things will turn out in the end. Some heads are round. Others have a more rectangular shape, sometimes they have a small rake to spread things out, but this can create a buildup on the edges leading to a rougher texture at the end. For the rectangular nozzle, the head itself needs to rotate so that the side head width remains perpendicular to the motion vector in most 3D printed houses today the concrete is exposed both outside and inside concrete is also the structural material that helps support everything and in typical construction these tasks are performed with very different materials m Materials that are designed to work well for their specific application, drywall, for example, is an excellent interior surface, but is not placed outside and is certainly not asked to help support the entire building, but with 3D printed concrete. extruded layered walls have to do it all and there are obvious compromises here, for example if something comes off a little in the on-site construction process you will always be haunted by a memory of this imperfection.

Forever, you don't need to print everything at once. Although in a single pass you can divide the house into different parts and some parts can be pre-built off-site or simply with a different orientation that will end up in the final house, you can turn it upside down, for example, and then turn it around. These pieces can be moved into place when it comes time to build the overall structure, this is how you make things like Cal levers for example, where there is nothing holding them underneath or maybe certain parts of the building aren't even there. 3D printed houses, perhaps like the porch or a sloped roof, would not make any sense to print.

That being said, 3D printed houses usually get an inner layer and an outer layer extruded, which are joined together with more layers of concrete that are printed back and forth or use these metal ties that help hold them together, so this It is a small scale example of how walls can be built. We do the exterior beads and we come back and do the filling of the structure and everything. This helps the overall strength of the wall and provides space for insulation in the middle for reference. This is also similar to the way you could make a brick wall inside the cavity which is filled with Styrofoam Pol which fills the gaps and insulates the entire assembly.

Water could also get into this space at some point, so the bottom is actually sloped with holes cut into the outer layer to manage drainage, so there are all these design limitations that seem pretty manageable to me. , but I think. The biggest challenge with 3D printing technology, at least as it stands now, has to do with the relativeinflexibility of the building after construction. If something happens to the 3D printed part of the structure, it is almost impossible to repair it to its original state. Say what you're going to do to get that giant machine out. Additionally, the machine needs direct access from above to do its job.

You're not going to remove the roof to fix it. Extensions or renovations are the same. Another limitation. What I see right now is that the companies that are using this technology are trying to become more vertically integrated, more so than the typical construction companies. They could have in-house architects, they manage the machines and supervise the entire construction process. In a truly closed system, an architect can't just dabble in 3D printed buildings, for example, so the barrier to entry is very high and what happens if the company that made your house goes out of business and you'll never be able to make repairs or Additions that fit with the original buildings are made with modules and layers for a reason, each layer adapts to the task it needs to perform and works in conjunction with the other layers of the whole.

Modularity ensures that any part can be replaced when necessary and leave no visible scars. Thinking of a building as a large seamless object is completely antithetical to the reality that buildings face. Building components could very easily be 3D printed and probably are today, but at that scale, the scale of a component, it's often cheaper to make it in other ways, it's easy to create a reusable mold to cast concrete. For example, it makes no sense to 3D print a construction part. that could simply be done more easily in another way and in this sense it seems curious to me that 3D printing in other industries is usually a method for making prototypes of things, it is not more efficient for large-scale manufacturing but with buildings because each It's more similar. a prototype, the promise of 3D printing is more about scalability and reproducibility, this modular manufacturing approach also holds true for other things like elevators, but most companies are not innovating manufacturing methods to provide a better shave, take cartridge blades for example, you will find them.

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