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Shanghai Company 3D Prints 6-Story Apartment Building and Villa
ErnieKey writes Last year, a Shanghai based company made news by 3d printing a bunch of houses. Now that same company, WinSun has accomplished something never seen before. They have successfully 3d printed a 6-story apartment building as well as an incredibly detailed home. The structures were unveiled at the Suzhou Industrial Park. "These two houses are in full compliance with the relevant national standards," Ma Rongquan, the Chief engineer of China Construction No.8 Engineering Bureau, explained. "It is safe, reliable, and features a good integration of architecture and decoration. But as there is no specific national standard for 3D printing architecture, we need to revise and improve such a standard for the future."
And yet summary says 6...
One of TFA says 5 stories and the other FA says 6 stories. I guess it all depends on how you like to count. But I am going with 5 stories as that is the number of windows high the apartment block is, and that particular FA seems to be the more authoritative one.
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it's not 3d printed concrete. it's 3d printed mortar. It's not strong stuff. I have seen some of the US based building prints and I am not impressed at all. On top of this nobody has done any seismic testing or other stability testing on any of the builds.
I believe it has potential, but not yet, and honestly building plywood forms and doing a pour over a welded reinforcement rod system is far far stronger than this. Plus they need a way to set in electrical and plumbing during the build process.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What caught me was the claim that they printed it all in a day. Concrete of any quality quick-drying fast enough to sustain the weight of a whole building, vertically? Really?
No, of course not.
They're only talking about the walls, and they're making them off site. The same process is used for any prefab concrete structure. What upholds their claim that they're using 3-D printing comes in that they can make any combination of shapes quickly and easily, without the need for a custom mold or form. Instead of setting all that up, it's just computer controlled - thus the actual gain, an 80% reduction in labor.
As others have noted though, we only have the company's word that it's safe. It doesn't seem like it has an internal rebar framework, or anything to sufficiently replace it ...
"Although, most of the cost of buying a house has more to do with procuring the land then it does with the actual cost of building it."
In the US, in 99% of the country, this is not the case. The land is fairly cheap. I've owned homes in NJ and FL. NJ is the most densely populated state. In both cases, the land was valued at about 5%-10% of the total value of the home. Even in the case where the property was on a pond on the 18th hole of a golf course.
"Might make sense in some places where cost of land is quite low. Although in many of those places, the infrastructure for building the "house factory" and transporting the house to the site would be the major problem to solve."
Also in the US, there are a good number of "pre-manufactured" home companies that already transport homes in sections to their final location. My sister has one.
And I'm not talking about "mobile homes". http://www.allamericanhomes.co...
You've never seen manufactured housing (aka mobile homes)? That do that all the time, and delivery it right to your site ready to be hooked into the power grid and water/sewer.
Don't like mobile homes? Try a modular home. Built in a factory with all the bits complete but in shipable-size pieces, assembled on site.
Still too much? there are a dozen different panelization technologies that will send you prefabricated parts you just screw or connect together.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
FTA: "The walls and other components of the structure were fabricated offsite with a diagonal reinforced print pattern and then shipped in and pieced together. The company then placed beam columns and steel rebar within the walls, along with insulation, reserving space for pipe lines, windows and doors."
From the text and what few pictures of the actual construction material they show, it looks like they basically print it with voids specifically for skewering it with rebar on-site.
Now, whether or not you trust the final assembler to actually *do* so and then backfill the voids with some sort of mortar so the rebar actaully has something to stick to... Well, we'll find out in the first big earthquake they get, I suppose.