Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a robotic 3D printing method to create buildings from scratch using earth materials without cement.
The custom mix design created afterward is based on 75 % of regular waste products from ETH Zurich’s industry partner – Eberhardt AG. Eberhardt AG converts the existing material to extremely lesser CO2 with a vision in the future to create additional mix designs for other buildings & load cases.
In contrast to usual concrete 3D printing, which requires pauses to allow the material to solidify, impact printing permits continuous layering of earth materials. It’s a process where a robot shoots material gradually from above to create a wall. During impact, the parts bond using a combined mixture of excavated materials, silt & clay.
With minimal additives, this construction 3D printing process is efficient, and eco-friendly compared to existing construction protocols which are slow-paced, and labor-intensive.
The building industry must quickly decrease CO2 emissions from new building techniques & shift the focus towards circular supply chains.
Dr. Lauren Vasey, a Postdoc at ETH Zurich says, “Impact printing is a novel robotic additive manufacturing method based on the high-velocity deposition of dense materials. So we’ve developed a custom tool that extrudes material, portions it into parts, and deposits material up to 10 meters per second. By depositing materials with this velocity, we can enable a bond between multiple parts. This helps us to build one or two-story walls and column structures. We are also working on robotic methods for integrating reinforcements to expand the type of structures that we can construct.”
Author: Nagarjun M
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