Contour Crafting - Global Prospects. Contour Crafting: 3D House Printer. Contour Crafting: 3D House Printer Perhaps you've used those programs that let you design your dream house, creating a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file. Not quite ready to take up the hammer and start building? Can you imagine a device large enough to let you "print" your house right straight from the drawings? Behrokh Khoshnevis (USC Engineering) has been perfecting his contour crafter. The material used is a semi-liquid quick-setting, concrete-like compound.
House construction is an incredibly wasteful process. Dr. "The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands. " This robot takes instructions from a CAD drawing and then squirts layers of semi-liquid construction material to build up vertical walls and domed roofs. There are a couple of science fiction tie-ins for this idea. Khoshnevis has plans for the Moon as well: It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. Current News. 3d-printer for building assembly.
You'll have seen concrete pouring trucks of the kind that have the large boom arm attached so that they can direct concrete to an area further than the truck can reach (as opposed to the trucks which just up-end and dump it straight on the ground.) Now imagine that boom arm with a motor attached rather than being manually guided, and the motor driven by a computer. We now have a large scale 3D printer for concrete. Now, you probably would not be able to just pour a house with solid walls and not expect it to all glug down to the floor, but you *might* be able to robotically put some shielding in place that would form a wall cavity which you then filled with concrete.
Or you could put up a dummy building in polystyrene, surround it with a different kind of foam (such as the kind you mix two liquids to create, as is used to make custom seats for race-car drivers), then melt off the polystrene version leaving a cavity to be filled. Robot builder could 'print' houses - 10 March 2004 - New Scienti. A robot for "printing" houses is to be trialled by the construction industry. It takes instructions directly from an architect's computerised drawings and then squirts successive layers of concrete on top of one other to build up vertical walls and domed roofs.
The precision automaton could revolutionise building sites. It can work round the clock, in darkness and without tea breaks. It needs only power and a constant feed of semi-liquid construction material. The key to the technology is a computer-guided nozzle that deposits a line of wet concrete, like toothpaste being squeezed onto a table. Engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis, at the University of Southern California, has been perfecting his "contour crafter" for more than a year. Now Degussa AG, of Düsseldorf, Germany, the world's largest manufacturer and supplier of building materials, is to collaborate on the project to help Khoshnevis find the best kind of building material.
Mud and straw The first house will be built in 2005. Online : Giant 3D printer can print buildings (theoretical. Blueprint Magazine describes a very neat machine: In a small shed on an industrial park near Pisa is a machine that can print buildings. The machine itself looks like a prototype for the automotive industry. Four columns independently support a frame with a single armature on it. Driven by CAD software installed on a dust-covered computer terminal, the armature moves just millimetres above a pile of sand, expressing a magnesium-based solution from hundreds of nozzles on its lower side. It makes four passes. The layer dries and Enrico Dini recalibrates the armature frame.
What do you think, readers? John Baichtal My interests include writing, electronics, RPGs, scifi, hackers & hackerspaces, 3D printing, building sets & toys. Related. Blog: 3D printing buildings: interview with Enrico Dini of D_Sha. Enrico Dini dreamt of buildings, construction and impossible shapes. He was particularly inspired by Gaudi's architecture and loved his fantastic(in every sense) work. He became a Civil engineer and later branched out into making machines. All the while dreaming of those impossible shapes. Traditional building methods tend to reel in dreamers outlandish dreams though. As Shapeways community members who have experimented with resin molds know, epoxy resin can stick to virtually anything.
He is now working on further improving the accuracy and will 3D print a full sized roundabout sculpture in Pisa Italy. Affable Enrico told me that his "small team is sitting on a huge opportunity. " The system works with a rigging that is suspended over the buildable part(you can see it at the top of the first image).
The technology would seem to be especially interesting for these architects. One thing that I personally found very compelling about the technology is that it does not use cement. ShareThis. 3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock | Inhabitat. Imagine a 3-d printer so large that it can spit out entire buildings made from stone. Sounds science fiction-y, right? But that’s exactly what designer Enrico Dini created with his prototype D-Shape printer. Dini hopes to use the printer to create buildings made of stone and eventually, moon dust. The printing process starts with a thin layer of sand.
We’re not sure that anyone will really bring D-Shape to the moon, but it is totally amazing to think about the implications a printer like this could have on construction here on Earth. Via Fast Company.