News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
Always at the cutting edge, MIT’s Mediated Matter lab has developed a new, experimental additive manufacturing technique that uses a swarm of small robots to build up tubular structures. The process, called FIBERBOTS, can enable the digital fabrication of large-scale architectures with high spatial resolution.
Danish construction 3D printing company 3D Printhuset, known for its BOD housing technology, will, from here on out, conduct all of its construction 3D printing activities through the newly established company COBOD International. The new company, which will be taking on the selling and manufacturing of the recently launched BOD2 construction 3D printer, was founded to meet a growing demand for 3D Printhuset’s construction technology.
German design firm Studio 7.5 recently teamed up with French concrete 3D printing company XTreeE to construct a series of 3D printed benches. The benches, notable for their woven textures, demonstrate how additive manufacturing can be employed to produce architectural concrete structures.
For the past several weeks, 3D printing has been making headlines around the world, and primarily in the United States. To the frustration of most of the industry, this significant media attention has been grabbed by the ever-notorious 3D printed gun debate, re-ignited by the U.S. government’s recent decision to legalize the proliferation of 3D printable gun files. “A 3D printed gun is downloadable death,” reads a CNN headline by actress Alyssa Milano. “Newly-legal 3D printed gun blueprints are a looming catastrophe,” reports the Telegraph.
With Mars nearer to us than it’s been in over a decade, it’s no wonder that space exploration and Mars missions have felt more palpable than ever. But it’s not only because the red planet could be seen by the naked eye this past week, it’s also because space organization NASA has been making some important inroads.
Beginning in 2014, the NASA 3D-Printed Habitat Competition has been challenging teams from around the world to propose effective solutions for colonizing the red planet through robotic building systems (which are now generally understood to be different types of 3D printers). After two stages where NASA awarded a total of over $1 million to competitors, the final prize was awarded to the top 5 projects.
hpl structural, a German engineering and construction firm specializing in complex steel structures, has found a way to dramatically improve its development process with the integration of 3D printing. Whereas the company’s designers would have typically inspected a digital CAD model to determine its structural feasibility, it can now 3D print physical models of the structures for a more detailed analysis and more accurate presentation.
ACTLAB, the experimental architecture laboratory at the Politecnico di Milano University in Italy has announced the completion of its 3D printed Trabeculae Pavilion. The ethereal, lightweight shell, which spans 36 square meters, demonstrates how 3D printing and bio-inspired computational design can come together to create truly stunning architecture.
The DFAB construction project underway at ETH Zurich aims to use all the latest digital technologies to produce a real three-story house. After using the robotic additive deposition to produce walls and advance composite materials for internal complex structures, now the researchers at ETH Zurich have fabricated an 80 m2 lightweight concrete “Smart Slab” lab using large format binder jetting technology. This makes the DFAB house the world’s first full-scale architectural project to use 3D sand printing for its formwork.
Despite the fact that construction 3D printing is still just taking off here on Earth, some companies are already looking beyond the Stratosphere towards building 3D printed habitats and liveable structures in space. The ambitious and quite niche branch of AM research, spurred on by space exploration organizations such as NASA and ESA, is being pioneered by a handful of companies who believe their construction AM platforms have the potential to be adapted for the harsh environments of the Moon and Mars.