After more than 30 years of development, 3D printing technology has become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the last decade, 3D printing has been applied to large-scale permanent buildings such as bridges, shelters, houses and offices. This revolutionary technology has huge market potential and could even revolutionize the traditional construction industry in the near future.
But do you know how to 3D print a house? In this article, we will explore the various techniques, equipment and materials that can be used.
3D printing house construction is generally divided into 2 ways, the first is modular printing and then assembled, refers to the 3D printer to produce independent units, and in the factory on the module interior decoration and layout, and then transported to the site, through the lifting of the module connected to the building as a whole.
The other is called in-situ printing, directly with 3D printers on the site of the construction, first in the house to be built on the open space to install a large building 3D printer, and then according to the house 3D design drawings, layer by layer extrusion of building materials for stacking molding, with the same time can also be other building materials installation, and ultimately print the entire house.
The following are the most used 5 kinds of 3D printing house construction methods.
3D printing of mixed soil
This is currently the most common solution used to 3D print buildings, and the structural integrity of the material has been proven with a number of success stories both at home and abroad.
This technique is the same as common FDM 3D printing, except that the material is changed from common wire to soil mix.
The machines are generally categorized into gantry-type and robotic arm-type, the former of which moves the print head by framed rails; within the confines of the rails, a layer-by-layer construction of the structure is achieved by extruding the concrete material from a nozzle. The latter does the same thing by modifying a conventional robotic arm.
Sand 3D printing
This technology is often used in the foundry industry, where sand molds can be printed directly without molds to create cast products through binder jet (3DP) 3D printing sand technology. But this revolutionary technology is also used for architectural 3D printing, first developed in Italy, where sand is deposited in very fine layers, and each layer is then binder-jetted to form a solid.
The process is more labor-intensive and time-consuming than concrete 3D printing, but it has the advantage of being better suited for use in hotter, drier countries, such as the beautiful homes in the Kisawa Sanctuary in Mozambique, Africa, where the main body of the buildings is molded in sand so that the days are cooler and the nights warmer.
Plastic 3D printing
Plastic is very familiar to the average 3D printing enthusiast, most people will use PLA, ABS, TPU or PETG to create their models. If we had a large size 3D printer, we could use it to print houses as well, for example Azure Printed Homes, a construction company from the United States, 3D printed a house by using recycled plastic.
They can reportedly print a house within 24 hours and these are mainly deployed in backyards as offices or residences. In fact, the key also lies in the material, as not all types of plastic are suitable for printing buildings that are placed outside and exposed to the natural environment. Previously, the Resource Library also reached out to Vidichamp’s MMLA 3D printing outdoor polymer alloy supplies, which may be more suitable.
3D printing from scrap
Earlier we mentioned the construction of houses through recyclable plastics, but scrap is not limited to recyclable plastics, but also includes metals, paper products, fiberglass and bio-waste.
Clay 3D printing
Clay houses were a common building technique in ancient times, and now it’s possible to build a house out of clay through 3D printing, which not only saves money by using local materials, but is also very environmentally friendly and is a sustainable eco-home. Here again, WASP’s TECLA Habitat is an example, which once again uses its modular Crane WASP 3D printer to print layer by layer in combination with local soil.
With a reported maximum floor area of 50 square meters, a large building can be constructed in a matter of days. The materials consist of sand, dirt, clay and water, which are mixed together by agitation and then added to the clay 3D printer, where a robotic arm controls the nozzles to build the body of the house in an extruded form, which is subsequently dried and hardened in the sun.
In fact, in addition to the 5 more common ways to 3D print a house above, the Yhnova House 3D printed housing from France uses a different approach.
By using BatiPrint 3D’s robotic arm 3D printer, parallel layers of insulated polyurethane were printed directly and then filled with cement in between. It is known to have cost around Rs 1.46 million to build, which is 20% cheaper than the same building using traditional solutions.
3D printing saves human resources, is efficient, cost-effective and more environmentally friendly than traditional construction techniques; it is believed that with the further development of the technology, the manufacturing cost will be able to be even lower, and 3D printing of economical houses will no longer be an empty phrase.
