New construction materials and product design for additive manufacturing processes in the construction industry

Digital fabrication is an emerging new technology in the construction industry as it decreases the need of human labour on construction sites and increases the freedom of architectural design as well as productivity. In BauProAddi the development of 3D printable materials and the development of additive manufacturing processes was targeted by a variety of industrial and academic partners in order to depict wide parts of the potential supply and value chains of 3D printing in construction. The production of cement and cement additives, hard- and software development of 3D concrete printers as well as the inclusion of 3D printing in the recent building processes and that of the future were topics addressed within the project. In the frame of BauProAddi several 3D printing devices were successfully developed, and various 3D printing materials were optimized on them. Further a volumetric flow-controlled extruder for 3D concrete printing was developed and successfully tested resulting in various demonstrators. Three dimensional objects with complex geometries were printed and software tools for the automatic generation of printing paths were programmed.

For industrial use, 3D printable materials with comparatively simple compositions were developed, and suitable characterization methods were adopted. Another major objective of the research project was the development of cements and binders with optimised environmental footprints that can be used in printable mortars and concretes. These binders are to be used to implement high-quality, fast, feasible and cost-effective, additive production processes in the construction industry. With this work, BauProAddi supports the important aspect of innovative as well as sustainable material development to enable the additive production process. Several publications rendered from this work and were published in international conferences and scientific journals.

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