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“World’s Largest Real Concrete 3D Printed Building” Goes up in Oman https://ift.tt/3Hj4ATe COBOD’s additive construction technology has been deployed worldwide, from Germany to Kenya, the U.S. to Belgium. The latest location for the Danish firm’s construction 3D printer is Oman, where COBOD technology was used to make “the world’s largest 3D printed real concrete building.” The key phrase there is “real concrete”, as 3D printed buildings, including those previously made with COBOD machines, typically rely on dry mix mortar formulas, not concrete. In part this is because concrete generally dries too slowly to self-support during the printing process. However, as unveiled with the first 3D printed house in Angola, a new concrete concoction called D.fab makes it possible to 3D print with real concrete and at the same, lower price. D.fab was developed by COBOD and CEMEX (NYSE: CX), a Mexican multinational building materials company with $13 billion in revenue and over 41,000 employees. Because read-to-mix dry mix mortars are five to 10 times the price of standard, ready-mix concrete, the partners sought to develop a solution that could be less expensive and created from local sand, gravel, cement. Only one percent of the total mixture consists “magic mix” from COBOD and CEMEX. This system of admixtures consists of specialty chemicals incorporated at the batching plant that makes the concrete more fluid and pumpable. Another admixture that speeds up the curing process is added in the dosing unit at the printhead, along the concrete to gain shape. According to COBOD, this drops the cost of materials by 90 percent.
The power of D.fab was first demonstrated with the 3D printing of a 53 m2 (570 sf) house in Luanda, the capital city of Angola, by additive construction company Power2Build. Using the material, the home cost less than €1,000 in concrete materials. This was followed by a 190 m2 (2,100 SF) home in Muscat, the capital of Oman, which relied on 99 percent locally sourced materials, aside from the D.Fab additives from Europe, which dropped the cost of the materials to under €1,600. COBOD claims that the same building with typical dry-mix mortar wold have cost over €20,000. The Omani house was 3D printed in two stages, with the material recipe and training of the local crew performed during part one and the second stage performed by the Omani crew entirely. Altogether, the project took just five days to complete. While D.fab doesn’t necessarily impact the CO2 emissions associated with the production of concrete, being able to use locally sourced materials certainly lowers the carbon footprint needed for transporting construction supplies. CEMEX is working with British Petroleum in a reported effort to “decarbonize” cement production and transportation. However, CEMEX itself does not have the most outstanding environmental record, having damaged ecosystems with its sand mining operations, released the toxic chemical chromium-6 into the air around its factories, and emitted hazardous dust at its plant in Rugby, England. What does seem to be clear is that this new additive system could make additive construction much cheaper, while automating the build process and possibly lowering costs related to labor, as well. What impact this has on the construction sector at large remains to be seen, but we do know that COBOD is quickly establishing itself as the leading manufacturer of construction 3D printers in the market so far. Printing via 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing https://3dprint.com December 28, 2021 at 07:33AM
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