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."

Comments

Re:TFA says 5 stories high

[circletimessquare]

well you can stand on the roof

you can't print 3D books!

[circletimessquare]

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 how will that standard be published and disseminated?

2D printers sigh with relief, they are still relevant

Is it really inexpensive?

[plover]

Sure it seems cheap, but have you seen the prices on the refill cartridges? Outrageous!

Re:Is it really inexpensive?

[Applehu Akbar]

And just try to clear a rebar jam.

Re:Is it really inexpensive?

[pla]

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.

Re:TFA says 5 stories high

[OzPeter]

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.

No one 3D printed a house

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply a way to cast concrete in a factory and then wheel the parts to the construction site.

You still need to add all the plumbing, wiring, windows, doors, flooring, etc...

Settle down with the hyperbole already.

It's not any different from using factory-trimmed wood or pre-cast concrete steps.

But just say "3D printing" and the mindless hype starts and brains turn off everywhere.

Re:No one 3D printed a house

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough assessment. However I'd like to see you frame a house, sheet it, roof it, drywall it, put siding on, trim it, for under $4800.

For that price, I don't necessarily think this is just "mindless hype".

Re:No one 3D printed a house

[quietwalker]

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 ...

Re:No one 3D printed a house

[Mente]

"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...

Re:No one 3D printed a house

[Overzeetop]

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.

For a sufficiently low value of "printed"

[tibit]

The printed part is a concrete skeleton that acts as a form that needs to cure and then be filled with concrete. None of the finishing work is printed. It is basically a cast-concrete structure, where the typical metal forms were replaced with a 3D-printed skeleton. Of course the printed skeleton is a couple orders of magnitude rougher than what you'd get with metal forms, so the walls need heavy finishing before they can be presentable.

What they've done is perhaps a step in the right direction, but they are very, very far from truly 3D-printing an entire building. First of all, they'll need to have an inline concrete mixer that can continuously mix a fast-curing mix, so that they could print shapes that are filled-in. They also need to change the shape of the nozzle so that the deformed (compressed) shape will be rectangular, and not oval as it is now. They really did everything without much thought or understanding of what it takes to do it right. It is, at best, cargo cult 3D printing. They did all the right moves without understanding what it really takes to do it.

Re:For a sufficiently low value of "printed"

[killkillkill]

they are very, very far from truly 3D-printing an entire building

has anyone actually stated that as a goal, or are you getting hung up on semantics?

They did all the right moves without understanding what it really takes to do it.

I think you misunderstand more things than they do. Beside missing the intentions and goals, like above, you don't seem to understand that no matter how clean you can the printed structural wall, nobody will be satisfied with it and throw up sheetrock or paneling. The difference between doing that on a perfectly smooth wall and one with a finish like this is trivial if you have a package of shims. This tech enables a smaller factory to create a greater variety of precast structures and brings the setup cost to custom or low volume structural pieces down to the cost of design and eliminate much of the cost of equipment and setup of manufacturing such pieces.

It also lowers the entry level to producing premaufactured modular structures. Give me the print head and printing material and I, as well a quite a large number of hobbyists, can build the 3-axis CNC and get Open Source software to run it. Give me an architectural engineer, some laborers and a forklift or two and the plant is ready to roll with production.

3D printing in general has gone down a lot of wrong paths (like one of the main goals being able to print more printers) but when you treat it as part of the manufacturing process (rather than having the fantasy or ordering "Tea Earl Grey Hot") it's a step forward in our ability to produce as a society.

Sure, it need further development, but not only is it a step in the right direction, it is a step with the forethought and understanding of how this technology could effectively be used in the real world in the foreseeable future.

Dont trust these at all.

[Lumpy]

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.

Champion

[JimSadler]

3D printing might receive my award for the most disruptive modern technology. It is obvious that there is a potential to replace almost 100% of the construction trades. And furniture makers might need to pray a bit as well. I am all for 3D printing but just like cell phones and personal computers 3D printing will have numerous ways of displacing human workers. There have already been boats built with 3D printing and I'll bet someone 3D prints an airplane in the near future. Automobiles with frames and bodies built by 3D printing are a distinct possibility. The displacement of human labor is accelerating rapidly. Yet US society has done nothing in preparation of the negative effects on the population. It makes no sense at all to wait until chaos is at hand to start reforming social practices to accomodate permanently displaced workers.