3D printed concrete homes: Engineering Explained

I'm sure these houses, if you maintain them properly, can easily last 100, 150 years. The walls themselves will last much longer than that. Well, there are a couple of different ways that we print houses. One is with a gantry system, which basically is a large structure that sits over top of the job site. You basically print the entire footprint all in different lifts as you come up. Each of them takes a day. In between you can run electrical, you can put the insulation in the walls. We are printing here with a robotic crawler arm printer. The idea with this is that it gives us the flexibility to print in a warehouse setting or off-site and then package those walls and take them to the site and set them up. Our plan is that we will use the robotic arm, bring it onto the construction site and be able to print with it on the slab of the house itself. which means that we will basically print it in layers like you would with a gantry but in smaller sections. With a wood house if you don't maintain it and you're not keeping water off of the house it very quickly will deteriorate to the point where you have to replace it or you lose the house. With these houses they might not allow you to have the best indoor air quality if you have water coming in and things like that but with good maintenance the houses will last for a long time and people can live in them and enjoy them. One of the big differences that we've seen is one of our homeowners lived on a very busy street and was interested in how the sound would work. We were concerned that the interior of the house would be noisy from sound bouncing off the walls. In fact, what it was doing really well was it was mitigating sound from the street. You walked in the house, you closed the door, you almost didn't know there was a street out there. They should be able to be built faster. Once you print it, it's ready to go in a lot of ways. That means that you can actually move forward the process of getting other trades into the house to do the other work that needs to happen and hopefully get people into the home faster. Another big difference, I would say, is the amount of waste. With a traditional construction process, there's quite a bit of waste. With this process, hopefully we're reducing that waste and we're kind of whittling it down to one material that we have to mitigate and work with. the cons in terms of the concrete mix it can be difficult to get it right if you get a certain distance up a wall and something happens well you might lose that wall and so it's a lot of trial and error and and you got to make sure that you really know what you're doing we're looking at different types of materials because the materials can be very expensive pros right now are its durability which is really important we've been talking about natural disasters and the ways that We need housing to last longer and be more durable, protect people better. I'm sure these houses, if you maintain them properly, can easily last 100, 150 years. The walls themselves will last much longer than that. My name is Andrew McCoy. I'm the Assistant Director of Innovation and Research for the Myers-Lawson School of Construction, and I direct the Virginia Center for Housing Research here at Virginia Tech. Music