3D Concrete Printer Can Build A 2500sqft Home In One Day

3D printing is big business, but up until now it has been about small things made of plastics. Sure there are other 3D printing technologies, such as the ones used in Formula 1 to create prototypes and there is even a company that can print metal objects, but nothing compares to the scale of this new concrete 3D printer.

The University of Southern California is testing a giant 3D printer than can print a whole house in less than 24 hours! Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis designed the giant robot which take the place of the entire construction work force and replaces it with a frame, a printer head and a tank of concrete. The basic principle is exactly the same as any other 3D printer, it’s just really, really, really big.

The potential for cheap, efficient builds is staggering and it could massively reduce the cost of home-owning, make quick and affordable shelter in disaster zones a reality and more.

“Ultimately it would work like this,” says Brad Lemley from Discover Magazine. “On a cleared and levelled site, workers would lay down two rails a few feet further apart than the eventual building’s width and a computer-controlled contour crafter would take over from there. A gantry-type crane with a hanging nozzle and a components-placing arm would travel along the rails. The nozzle would spit out concrete in layers to create hollow walls, and then fill in the walls with additional concrete… humans would hang doors and insert windows.”

Just imagine picking a house design from an iPad, thinking “hey I don’t want that door there!” so you just adjust the model, upload it to the printer and the very next day you’re fitting the carpets, awesome!

Don’t be fooled to thinking this is a cheap copy of a house either, the Contour Crafting technique prints the walls that can resist 10,000PSI (pounds per square inch) compared with a regular wall that would normally take 3,000PSI.

The potential is huge for this project, multiple printers could build anything from office blocks to whole estates, or even just larger houses in record time, for lower prices and could be integrated with traditional building techniques to create homes that were previously impossible, or too complex to construct by hand.

Thank you MSN for providing us with this information.

Images courtesy of MSN.