While we very often hear about how 3D printing is used to construct walls for housing, floors are still a more niche subsegment of construction 3D printing. As partners Autodesk and Additive Tectonics recently demonstrated, however, there is big potential in leveraging additive manufacturing for the production of flooring, as the technology can unlock greater efficiency and sustainability.
Software company Autodesk recently teamed up with 3D printed architecture specialist Additive Tectonics to explore the possibilities of 3D printing flooring slabs using 3D printed formwork, a low-carbon geopolymer concrete and natural-fiber reinforcement. The project was driven by the fact that conventional concrete floor construction is far from an efficient process, requiring lots of labor as well as many types of carbon-intensive materials like cement and steel.
As Autodesk explains, traditional concrete floors have three key challenges. First, their reliance on cement and steel drives up the carbon footprint (cement, after all, is responsible for roughly 8% of all global CO₂ emissions). Second, they require formwork, often made from steel or wood, which are temporary and often discarded. And third, conventional concrete floors are not optimized in their design, resulting in heavy structures. 3D printing, with its design freedom and compatibility with all-around more efficient materials, can address all of these.
“At Autodesk Research, we look for bold ways to solve challenges facing the industries we serve,” the company said. “Teaming up with research partner Additive Tectonics was a natural fit: their process demanded a new design mindset, and our tools could help push its potential. Together, we explored how to combine their manufacturing expertise with our design and simulation capabilities to reimagine structural building elements.”
The 3D printed flooring project relied on Additive Tectonics’ Selective Cement Activation (SCA) technology, a particle-bed 3D printing technique that selective applies a binder to layers of dry mineral powder resulting in high-resolution, functional structures. For the production of the stay-in-place formwork, SCA technology was used in combination with Additive Tectonics’ econitWood material, a wood-mineral composite made from upcycled beechwood and magnesium oxide. The binder used is simply salt water, which is selectively sprayed from 2,500 nozzles in the SCA 3D printer
Manufacturing on Demand
The formwork design was optimized using Autodesk Inventor Nastran, a program with CAD-embedded finite element analysis, with the aim of minimizing material usage. This was ultimately achieved using a ribbed form that reinforced the flooring slab’s load paths.
In the second step of the flooring production, the partners were interested in replacing steel rebar reinforcement with more sustainable materials. While Additive Tectonics first explore the potential of basalts, the team ultimately found the best results using flexible flax fibers. These were wound around built-in 3D printed pins in the formwork using a robotic arm. “Structural stress maps were translated in Dynamo into continuous winding paths, allowing robotic placement of fibers within the complex formwork geometry,” Autodesk specified.
Finally, a potassium-activated geopolymer mortar—a more sustainable alternative to cement which is unviable for traditional flooring because of its incompatibility with steel—was cast in the 3D printed formwork, creating a strong bond with the flax-fiber reinforcement. The results of this new flooring approach was a strong structure that is lighter and more ecological than conventional cement flooring.
According to Autodesk, this 3D printing-centered approach to flooring construction is ready to scale. As the partners develop the project further, there is also the potential to integrate space for building services and attachment points into the flooring, which would eliminate the need for a suspended ceiling.
“We’ve only scratched the surface of all of these technologies, including sustainability,” said Allen Groom, Principal Research Scientist at Autodesk Research. “What we’ve been able to prove is that we don’t have to resort to straight lines, we can make complex geometries, we can reinforce them and we can make them trustworthy to incorporate into our structures.”
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Lib Work 3D prints 100m² earthen house in Japan: The home in question is the Lib Earth House Model B, and is reportedly the first “fully operational residential house built through additive manufacturing using natural materials available on the market.” One of the primary motivations for Lib Work was to phase out the use of cement in its builds. From an environmental standpoint, this makes perfect sense, as the production of cement is responsible for a significant amount of CO2 production (as much as 8% of the globe’s CO2 emissions).
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Author: Tess Boissonneault
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