Carlos Grados
Can it print insulation? If so maybe the printer could build a passive house!
Alien
There would seem to be absolutely huge potential in this system.
The key question surely must be: is it cost effective in producing either small structures (e.g. a sandstone sculpture) or indeed for complete buildings? I refer to both the cost of the finished \'product\' and also the capital cost of the D-shape equipment.
The technology should allow high precision creations - with finer tolerances than are normally achieved by conventional methods.
Gizmag, do please keep us informed of progress on this.
n3r0
The problem is, to build a two story building, it would require a mound of sand of equal size to build it. The sand that serves as the support structure must fill all of the empty space in the building. They would have to ship in 10-100 times the weight in raw materials just to make it four times as fast.
Matt Fletcher
If you want a round one story house with no windows, doors, electrical or plumbing made of non-reinforce concrete walls then your all set, look no further. But I imagine not to many people will want one. Instead I see this printer being used for not much more than giant concrete sculptures which the maker of the printer making some money for a few years before others people do the same thing for relatively little investment and technology. Interesting concept but hardly deserving of the title.
William H Lanteigne
Sand is about the cheapest building material there is, and it\'s abundant just about everywhere, so the raw materials wouldn\'t have to be transported very far; and since the material used to support the finished part can be reused, this is ultimately a very cost-effective method, with very little if any wasted material. The downside is, I can see this putting stone/brick/concrete masons out of work, replaced with a handful of specialists to run the machinery and some unskilled laborers hired to shovel out the unused sand.
Denis Klanac
n3r0, how did you come up with that idea? I think you might be a tad off with that one.
christopher
\"Insulation\" is a fancy word for \"trapped air\". It would seem feasible to \"print\" the insulated parts in a structure similar to bones - solid outer parts, and a honeycomb internal lattice.
Plumbing would seem similarily simple - just \"print\" the voids through which the fluids can flow (or cables can be pulled even).
There\'s an interesting \"concrete house printer\" that doesn\'t use \"filler\" material - the print-head is also a crane, so while it\'s printing the walls in-situ, it\'s also printing beams on a spare patch of ground. When it gets to the roof (or floor of next level), the beams are by then dry, and the crane lifts them from the ground and places them on the walls. Same idea for the top sections of windows and doors etc.
Continuous pour concrete is a pretty well known technique - I\'m very surprised that we still don\'t see complete \"things\" built by robots using this technique yet. Actually - \"amazed\" is probably closer to my sentiment. Consider any multi-story project - the labor costs alone to build the thing would seem \"back of the envelope\" to be many times greater than the entire invenstment needed to design, buy, and build a robot to do it all autoamtically.
That said - looking at the past - every time anyone has whined about computers replacing human jobs, the reverse has been true - more people end up working on the computer side of things, than ever got displaced elsewhere... The highest proportion of all the richest companies and people in the world are computer ones - that\'s a lot of jobs!!
agulesin
@christopher - any chance of a link to that house printer? sounds interesting...
Facebook User
Its about time the home building industry caught up with technology. With the price of housing climbing well out of practical reach of everyone but billionaire CEOs we need this. The price of an energy efficient (zero carbon zero energy) home should not exceed the annual salary of the average worker, same with an electric vehicle, and both should last almost forever. Efficiency will allow us to have 100 billion humans on planet earth, and nothing more.
David Austin
Open your minds people. He doesn't have to print with sand. He can print with anything ... like little foam balls bound with cement, which foam balls are manufactured on the spot. This means he can make huge strong structures with a couple trucks full of relatively cheap chemicals.