While houses of varying quality have been 3D-printed before, one contractor in Minnesota wants to build one such home by using a specially designed 3D printer that uses cement as a filament, without compromising on build quality or design, 3DPrint reports. Furthermore, the contractor’s aim isn’t to finish the house as fast as possible, but rather to 3D print it efficiently and securely.
“A cheap house built in 24 hours is not my goal,” Andrey Rudenko said. “My current focus is building well-insulated small or medium-sized homes of a contemporary design, definitely onsite. As an experienced builder, I know that to avoid problems in the future, it is more important to produce homes of a good quality, which may take longer to build than cheaper homes made quickly. It would be more beneficial to print a complete home, including the foundation for the staircase, fireplace, certain furniture (kitchen island etc), columns, interior walls, and any wiring or plumbing that would fit inside the printed walls.”
Rudenko faces many challenges including legal ones, such as obtaining a permit for constructing a building using 3D printing technology, but also related to the actual 3D printing process.
Since the 3D printer uses a cement/sand mix filament, he has to find a way to deal with the high viscosity of cement when it comes to pushing it out efficiently through the pump. In actual outdoor conditions, he also has to make sure each 20mm layer of cement “printed” by the machine becomes hard enough so the machine can move to the next layer.
As the project evolves, Rudenko wants to 3D print a 2-story home and then a “contemporarily-designed energy-saving house.” Before that, however, the contractor will build a smaller children’s castle to test it out.
A video showing this special cement-printing machine follows below.
