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Chinese Company '3D-Prints' 10 Buildings In One Day
Lucas123 writes: A company in China has used additive manufacturing to print 10 single-room buildings out of recycled construction materials in under a day as offices for a Shanghai industrial park. The cost: about $5,000 each. The company, Suzhou-based Yingchuang New Materials, used four massive 3D printers supplied by the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. Each printer is 20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long. Like their desktop counterparts, the construction-grade 3D printers use fused deposition modeling (FDM), where instead of thermoplastics layer after layer of cement is deposited atop one another. The cement contains hardeners that make each layer firm enough for the next. Yingchuang's technique builds structures off site in a factory one wall at a time. The structures are then assembled onsite. The technique is unlike U.S.-based Contour Crafting, a company whose 3D printing technology to form the entire outer structure of buildings at once, The Yingchuang factory and research center, a 33,000 square foot building, was also constructed using the 3D printing manufacturing technique. It only took one month to construct.
I guess it's enough to print a large hut.
Do we know how safe it is to work or live in a building made of these chemicals?
I remember when portables started being added to schools, it was determined all the various chemicals in them were making kids and teachers sick.
They need to determine the potential effects on health first.
They can't be any worse than the corrupt politicians we have in power now.
Jonny Depp is behind all this, I tells yaz
Those structures are bigger and sturdier than a tiny house with the added advantage of being made from recycled building materials.
The real question is structural strength and integrity and what agents are they using to make the mix dry fast. The Chinese could be using some nasty chemicals that wouldn't fly in building materials over here (Chinese drywall anyone?).
Still, if the units end up being even roughly equivalent to poured concrete, I could see living in a printed house, no problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
No fusing of molten material, just good, clean extrusion of concrete
As the future president of the U.S.A. would say, I'm not sure.
I would trust Contour Crafting constructions since they're built in a single run. But not this method of printing half walls in a factory which are then assembled on-site, I'm not sure what they're gaining by doing it this way. Looks more like a 3D printed puzzle to me.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Seems they could have simply created some "molds" with a some 2x4s and a couple plywood sheets and just dumped the cement formula in to make the individual walls instead of this elaborate process. How has the process of making a cement slab been improved by using an expensive industrial grade 3D printer? Smells like "we did it because we could" rather than "doing it because you should".
...phthalates and bisphenol A vapors?
that one caught on fire, burned down, fell over then sank into the swamp
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Time to invest in a few of these companies.
While 3d printing is cool and all what advantage does 'printing' concrete slabs offer or normal precast molds and just pouring the concrete in the old fashion way?
The article doesn't make it clear, but since this is a company and not an experiment one has to assume they see sort of useful reason in doing it this way, but for the life of me I don't see what it is.
If you're using a mold for concrete it's almost literally as fast as you can pour the concrete when using one...
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
RE: the headline
No. From TFA:
Yingchuang New Materials Inc. was able to print the shells of 10 one-room structures in 24 hours
The way this summary is worded, they make it sound like this company actually printed the buildings in place. Which did not, in fact, happen.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
There is no way this will fly here, as there are so many building codes it would have to get past.
First thing that comes to mind is the structures ability to withstand an Earthquake.
Being as you cannot put rebar in to the concrete of a 3-D printer or its mold, you lose a ton of strength from your structure.
Second, major structures have PVC conduits running through the slab, so unless they make a 3D printer that can print Concrete, Steel, and Plastic, all at once, without any of those pieces losing strength, then existing construction methods will continue to be used for the foreseeable future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Portland_Cement_Company#Concrete_housing
Chinese, in contrast to Americans, are more interested in 3D-printing buildings than in 3D-printing guns.
Color me misinformed.
they 3d printed bits of it and then assembled them...
which is probably fine just a distinction.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The problem is that a half-hour after you move into one of these houses, you want to move into another.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1) offer strength-to-weight savings (vs. solid slab cement walls)
2) use less material for a given surface area (yeah, this follows #1),
and 3) allow some extra insulation if warranted by the destination environment.
Also it would probably allow different configurations depending on how tall one wanted to stack (thicker lower-flow pieces; thinner upper-floor pieces). And the other point about embedding services cabling & plumbing stands; I could see them using standard interconnects to splice things together as they get assembled. *shrug* Maybe all that is common place today with prefab walls; don't know ianapfba (pre-fab building architect).
My first thought was "Big deal, another kind of prefab building" but the design + deposit is pretty interesting. This gets into some of the same things for machining I've read about where casting and/or subtractive (cnc milling) runs into limitations; additive manufacturing can create nested structure that were just not possible before. *shrug* It is cool to see people doing neat things with cement++.
And maybe - at some point - it would be cost effective for larger & taller structures to print segments on-site (and possibly at elevation for multi-story units). I don't know that they need to print in-situ; having useful-sized freshly printed & cured components (think just-in-time lego-blocks for the construction crew) could still be useful.
(One downside: I wonder about the "quick-set" additives and how nice (or not-so-nice) it would be to breath anything that off-gassed after it was all put together.)
The primary cost of building a tropical doldrum Atmospheric Vortex Engine is a huge hollow structure called the "arena" that contains the low pressure created by the vortex. The low pressure is relieved through compact, high speed turbines at the base of the arena. Since the turbines are compact they don't have to be costly and since they are high speed they don't have to be numerous.
What good is a tropical doldrum Atmospheric Vortex Engine?
It can generate its own building material from the ocean and atmosphere -- so if you can print them rapidly you can have rapid doubling time exponential growth in clean baseload electric production that within a decade dwarfs all energy use by civilization.
Oh, and it also provides tropical atoll seasteads sufficient to feed and house the total population of the world.
Seastead this.
Seastead this.
Citation please.
There's a construction technique called "tilt-up" where one pours the concrete for a wall on the ground or on a mould, flat on the ground, then after it's cured, rotate it up 90 degrees. Unfortunately it became common in the sixties to do this with really *ahem* avant-garde textures, and the whole method fell out of fashion. It would be just as possible to design a mould to be assembled with cheap or scrap wood to get the same sort of honeycomb cell structure. That sort of thing is already used when pouring multiple floors in some concrete buildings.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Radon homes
How is this better than simply putting up a steel building?
Another benefit is labour: The concrete printer is automated, so you need a guy to monitor it and maybe two to occasionally crane a completed module out of the print volume. On-site personnel assemble the pre-fab blocks. With pre-fab forms & pour, you need a lot more active people on-site to assemble the forms, pour, monitor the cure, and remove the forms. And because of load limits, you can't pour an entire multi-story structure in one day.
Time of people on site is a big cost factor, so dropping this gives big savings. You get the flexibility and customisation benefits of custom modules, but with the labour saving of pre-fab assembly.
That makes sense r.e. "tilt-up". I've read that with plastic molding getting the mold to let go of the plastic itself can be non-trivial; I wonder how thin one could make the nested structures in cement-based molding and still get the form out of the wall once it had set enough to support its own weight. *shrug* :-)
All very cool stuff; some days I think it would be more fun to work with atoms instead of bits. I suppose there a lots of people doing both these days
If only the three little piggies had access to this device...