Posted on 06/27/2021 9:26:44 AM PDT by dynachrome
Thursday morning, the massive piece of technology used concrete to help build a 1,550-square-foot home with three bedrooms and two baths.
”It’s a home where your wall are made out of concrete instead of wood that’s it,” said Zachary Manngeimer, CEO of Alquist, a 3D printing construction firm from Iowa City.
“It’s mixed in a mixing bowl and from there it goes through a tube into a printer head and that printer head is programmed to go around and print the wall system,” said Chris Thompson, Director of Virginia Housing.
The process to build the walls takes about 15 hours but requires less labor, and fewer materials than your standard job, but besides that, contractors say this home is no different from any other.
” It’s the same plumbing, same electrical, same HVAC, and same roof structure. All of that is the same,” said Manngeimer.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbc12.com ...
How do they inject the rebar?
Doesn’t look like any to me.
That doesn’t sound like a very good idea.
The exterior is all concrete that follows a 3D. Everything else is the same. It’s claimed this will reduce housing prices. I’m a Realtor in VA and I can tell you 1st hand, lumber is so expensive that it has slowed new custom builds big time.
Lumber futures are down and lumber will come down as well, but not nearly as much as futures IMO. Now that lumber is so high, they’ll want to keep it as high as possible. This could force lumber manufacturers to be more competitive.
Not needed for those walls.
Where appropriate fiber wires are injected.
What about using what is it, aluminum studs?
I saw a video of a machine that could lay concrete blocks even faster than this robot. Looks like that would be even cheaper.
Is this really a printer, or is it a robotic concrete pouring system?
I saw a show on I think it was called Monster Moves (Spark) that a builder in Colorado built a factory on site and reduced the 100 days to build a house to 29 days or less. Most everything was built indoors then rolled out onto a mover with many wheels and rolled over to the foundation. His family had built some 15 skyscrapers in Denver and were now building 237 homes.
Here it is showing animation of the move.
The rest of the show also shows building floating homes.
https://youtu.be/O4c6ipJ6Ff0?t=2751
The storage and transport costs are worse for concrete blocks, actually.
Not shown in that video, but there are variants that install rebar as part of printing where required, and as others have mentioned there is also glass fiber reinforcement as required.
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