At the Canal House project in Amsterdam, a special container (left) was required to house the on-site printer (below left and right) to protect it from dust, vibration and humidity
the printer an equivalent 20 hours. “So would a model twice as big be
printed at the same rate?” Culling asks Preumont reasonably. But the answer is “no“. “Timing is physics, chemistry and mechanics — it relates to the power of the engine running the print head, the energy needed, the weight of the head. So twice as big is twice the length, height and thickness or 2 x 2 x 2 — that’s eight times as long.” But surely that performance will improve over time? Yes, but Preumont still points out that FDM is constrained by the basic principles of mechanical engineering. “Four times faster is four times more energy — you can’t alter that. What you can do is make the material lighter, or reduce the thickness — or use a bigger printer.” Looi then touches on another practical
into mainstream construction. Loughborough’s Freeform Construction project has already 3D printed a double curving concrete wall section with voids for service runs already in place, the deposition nozzle “printing” the concrete, layer by painstaking layer. And Looi has been reading about work at the University of California to develop new 3D printable concrete for its Contour Crafting technology that has three times the compressive strength of conventional concrete.
And because everything in 3D printing is bespoke, the technology brings the complex and costly into the same realm as off-the-shelf components. Carter, for instance, relates the potential to the challenges of building a Zaha Hadid curvilinear design, for instance. “We’ve built a couple of Zaha buildings and had to use software to transfer the design into something you could actually build. But this could extend the boundaries of what you could build,” he says. It is clear that 3D printing lends itself to
24 | OCTOBER 2013 | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER
decorative elements and non load-bearing applications; Lee refers to follies and installations. But could it ever be scaled up to become a viable alternative to mainstream industrial manufacturing technologies, such as pouring concrete into shutters, extruding aluminium for cladding, manufacturing insulation materials? At iMakr, our panellists are keen to explore the technical limitations of the system and what it would take to shift it out of London boutiques and Wired magazine and on to construction sites.
Practicalities First, there was a demonstration of high street 3D printing as it exists today, which is a reminder that the technology has some distance to travel. Preumont shows a printed architectural model of a group of houses, made using a fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer and a material called ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene). The model looks like the sort of thing a skilled modelmaker could produce in a couple of days. As it turns out, it took
issue. “Are the machines sensitive to dust and vibration? If you’re pouring concrete on site, would you have to protect the machine?” Preumont confirms that this would probably be the case, and Lee adds that today’s printers are also very sensitive to humidity. It explains why the Dutch architects behind the most advanced 3D print-a-house project to date, the Canal House in Amsterdam, put their on-site printer in a mini-house of its own, the so-called Kamer Maker. In fact, Lee and Preumont point out
that there’s nothing very high-tech about 3D printing. Although everyone in construction thinks of it in the same breath as BIM, the technology was actually developed more than 30 years ago. “The technology is very simple — just three motors going along the x, y and z axes and software,” Lee says. It turns out that the recent upsurge of interest in 3D printing is related more to the lapsing of critical patents than any technological breakthrough, with another important patent due to expire in 2014. But Lee sees the relative simplicity of the technology as a strength, as it lowers the barriers to entry for innovators to develop new printers, print heads or printable materials, in construction or other fields. “3D printing opens up the possibility of other players coming into the industry,” notes Eynon. And Lee has just spotted an innovation that ushers in more possibilities. “The new Vista print head can work with multiple materials and they’re selling just the print head.
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