Experimental prediction of material deformation in large-scale additive manufacturing of concrete
Graphical Abstract
Section snippets
Introduction and motivation
Recently, using AM techniques in the building industry became more popular, as architects and engineers attempt to use their potential to build free-form, unsupported structures automatically. Even though AM technology in the building industry is in its early stage of adoption, it can be cost effective and time efficient while improving accuracy in construction [1]. These potential advantages have motivated many recent studies aimed at improving the technology, particularly, applied to
State of the art in large-scale additive manufacturing
In the architectural field of interest, AM has been used for concept modeling [10]. However, scaling up AM techniques for full-scale automated building construction can have a strong impact on the construction industry with increasing customization and design flexibility, reducing construction time, and reducing manpower and construction cost [11]. Although the use of AM for this purpose include experimentation with various materials such as plastic, metal, and clay [12], the focus of this
Printing material and printing system
The material used in all the experiments described in this study was developed by Gulf Concrete Technologies in cooperation with our research team. The mixture was a blend of Portland cement, lime, pulverized limestone, specially graded masonry sand, fibers and admixtures (Table 2). The maximum particle size in GCT concrete was 1 mm.
Mastersizer 3000 system, which applies laser diffraction technique was used to measure the particle size and particle size distribution of the GCT material. The
Experimental setup and methods
In this study three different set of experiment were conducted. Test 1 targeted the effect of the number of adjacent beads and layers on layer width deformation, Test 2 was aimed at finding the time interval after which the printed material stops deforming, and Test 3 studied the effect of different interlayer time intervals on layer height deformation.
Conclusions and future work
This study is part of a larger study whose goal is to study and model material deformation in construction scale additive manufacturing of concrete to compensate for such a deformation in toolpath design. For this purpose, a printing system consisting of a robotic arm and an industrial scale mixer and pump were used, together with a Portland cement-based concrete mix developed on purpose for 3D printing. Previous work addressed the effect of printing orientation and direction and the number of
CRediT authorship contribution statement
The paper study the effect of time, the number of beads and the number of layers on deformation of a printed concrete mix. Negar is the PhD student who carried out the research, advised by J. Duarte in design computing, S. Nazarian in material matters, and N. Meisel in engineering design.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This research was financially sponsored by The Raymond A. Bowers Program for Excellence in Design and Construction of the Built Environment, The Pennsylvania State University, Autodesk, Inc. ®, and Golf Concrete Technology (GCT). The authors express their gratitude to Dr. Sven Bilén, Dr. Ali Memari, Dr. Aleksandra Radlińska, Mr. Jamie Heilman, Mr Zhanzhao Li, and Mr. Nathan Watson, for their valuable insights and contributions to this research.
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