Printed Concrete House
Printed Concrete House
(OP)
When was the last time you drove down the highway without seeing a commercial truck hauling goods?
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RE: Printed Concrete House
RE: Printed Concrete House
RE: Printed Concrete House
Cute, but
>> if the coastal population densities are going to double, SFHs aren't really going to hack it.
>> who wants to live in a concrete house?
>> how are the wiring, plumbing etc. going to happen? This is typical done as part of the framing. Without that step, you'd have to drill through concrete to get wiring and plumbing, and drilling through concrete is non-trivial
>> a more pressing issue is how am I going to hang my pictures on a concrete wall?
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RE: Printed Concrete House
RE: Printed Concrete House
RE: Printed Concrete House
RE: Printed Concrete House
We hang pictures by drilling an 1/8" slanted hole and sticking a nail in it.
RE: Printed Concrete House
I don't see reinforcement of a printed concrete house as a particularly big challenge. One could add fibers to the mix before deposition. Or, in the interest of saving material (and maybe providing a small amount of insulation), one could print the walls with open cells, just like concrete block. One could also print it with small round open cells from top to bottom, and just fill those with grout and drop in a rebar. It should also be possible to print a shaped horizontal groove in the wall as it goes up, pause briefly, and lay in the sort of reinforcements sometimes used between courses of block. One laborer with no great skill required.
If the wall goes up more or less continuously in a spiral manner, you wouldn't get 'day joints', though you might get 'hour joints'. I don't know if that's a problem or not.
I wouldn't even rule out the possibility of printing a sloped roof and concrete trusses to support it, but I'd suspect that might have to go slowly, or require temporary shoring.
Speaking of slowly, that's the problem. I'd bet a good block-laying crew could get a typical wall up faster than a printer, so the technology has to be sold on reducing skilled labor content, or some other virtue that is not immediately apparent to me.
Preparing a foundation and rails just for the printer is probably not going to fly. A successful printer will probably have to be mounted on a truck, look like a concrete pumping snorkel, 'touch off' the corners of a slab to establish its starting plane like a CMM or robot does, and then 'just print' from a program without further assistance.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Printed Concrete House
http://www.nceng.com.au/
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
RE: Printed Concrete House
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Printed Concrete House
my apologies
http://www.nceng.com.au/
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
RE: Printed Concrete House
http://www.contourcrafting.org/
http://craft.usc.edu/CC/images/houses_future.pdf