Design and construction of a cost-effective 3D extrusion based concrete printer

Abstract

For the past twenty years, the world’s population has increased from 6.1 billion to 7.8Billion and this has led to urgent need for construction to provide shelter for this population. With the increasing outbreak of disasters such as wars, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes among others, there has been damage on the existing houses causing an increase in the refuge population around the world being. 3D concrete printing is an innovative construction method that is very advantageous in the construction field in terms of optimizing construction time, cost, design flexibility, error reduction, and environmental aspects. Some companies came up technologies include modular construction, construction exoskeleton, construction robots, Building Information Modelling and 3D printing. Concrete is extruded through a nozzle to build structural components layer-by-layer without the use of formwork or any subsequent vibration. When a layer has been 3D printed, fast re-building of the static yield stress is required to retain the printed shape despite self-weight and that of upper layers The contribution of this study is to identify and resolve the various design and operational constraints of 3D concrete printing, which are of vital importance for future development of this construction technology. Experimental results are presented concerning the tests performed to determine the behaviour of the printed concrete and the one from conventional methods of construction. This study therefore aims at designing the printing machine and the result is a prototype of the cost effective 3d extrusion based concrete printer with automated concrete mixer.