First 2 Story REAL CONCRETE Printed Building in North America

are you ready for a super candid insight into the 3d printed construction industry from a company that isn't afraid to share the details i'm here in ontario canada visiting a company called nidis 3d hi i'm ian arthur i'm the president and founder of nidis 3d we're standing here in front of what is a really impressive project it's a multi-story 3d printed concrete building the first in north america the bottom part of this building is going to be used as a cnc workshop and up top we're putting in a two-bedroom in-law suite that the homeowner is going to have connected to the main house these may not look like fun but it's really what makes this project so impressive this equipment is what enabled them to use concrete instead of mortars the not-so-secret sauce of how we're building with concrete we're mixing everything on site and it really gives a lot of versatility to what we're doing we're able to source local aggregates and sand adjust the additive mixtures as is needed for temperature time of day whether it's sunny or cloudy and it really allows us to hone in the product that we're extruding we take cement from this silo we have sand and egg up there we're mixing it and we're able to kind of continuously do quality assurance on the material we're extruding and really really hone in on what's going to be productive for for printing that day we use cobot screeds on this to achieve a level of wall smoothness that we're pretty proud of we think we can actually get a lot better in the future and we have a few sort of innovative ideas on how to improve the screens to get this this surface even smoother uh you can see the differences where we managed to print on day one uh day two and then able to top out the rest of the first story on day three so we were pretty happy with that amount of layer time uh we played we got to a really significant layer height here that we weren't able to achieve on previous prints we're printing at a 40 mil layer height which uh is is about the max of what we're able to achieve and we also managed to speed up the print we we adjusted a lot of the angles on this building design so that we could keep the printer in flow as what we're calling it and it allowed us to drop the initial air time from 18 minutes all the way down to eight minutes by the time we were done printing so above me we have a poured slab roof so there needed to be a lot of separation because of the multiple uses for this building we have a workshop down here where they're going to generate a lot of noise and then some living space above it so we we opted for the poured concrete floor it's a it's a standard com slab system uh which we were able to integrate we have poor columns supporting it so it's not actually resting on the printed material in order to allow us to build multiple stories and meet code one of the most significant parts of this build is this beam that we were able to 3d print and grow above us and so you can see some reinforcement and grout down here and again throughout this structure up here there will be a single support added to the center of that beam but that is a lift in place 3d printed beam with reinforcement structurally engineered we think we're probably one of the first groups to kind of attempt something on that scale it worked really really well and it really opens the door for what else we're able to do with our printer pure light used to be a lot more popular as an insulation but it's kind of fallen out of favor because it's a it's a particle insulation you need a cavity to pour it into and icf is the inverse of what you would need for it and there's not a lot of uses for it but it's uh affordable and uh very well suited to insulating twin veneer structures like the one behind me the seam that we see right here is the separation from the part of the building that was printed in place and what we call lift in components and the important part of that is that we were able to produce a building that was bigger than the footprint of our printer so the seam that you see behind me right here is the separation between the part of the building that was printed in place and the part that we did is lift and components this allowed us to actually build a structure that's bigger than the printable area of the printer we have and we did it simultaneously so the inside of this building was a large open space and we produced all of these parts at the same time a it allowed us to build a bigger structure but it also allowed us to optimize our layer time we were able to put enough components in that we could run the printer at full speed and not slow it down because we didn't actually have enough material placement between one layer and the next what we have here is just some of what what are going to be exhaust vents so because this is a workshop down here right to my right is going to be a mechanical room so we were able to core drill through this before we poured in the insulation put the conduit in place that's allowing us to put in some pretty uh significant mechanical as we finish this building so behind me you see some of the printed components that are going to finish the second story of this building and then a whole bunch of smaller components which are actually all going to queen's university for uh compressive strength testing we've had a lot of success with the mix that we have we're hitting about a 45 mpa after 28 days on the mix which is a very very very strong concrete material reinforcement in these samples is structured in a different way and it's to provide comparative testing uh that we're doing with the university so they'll be put under very similar conditions we'll see which ones perform the best and be able to make design decisions based on that over here we have uh aircraft cable so par part of what we're doing with the lift in components which we think is really important for the future of 3d printing for the entire industry is that we can design these print them in one place and then move them with a crane or whatever else you need to another one and so right here we figured out we could use aircraft cable so we do uh we engineer the the print so that we know where the lift points need to be for this specific piece of material we embed the aircraft cable at those points and we know that we have an even lifting capacity on this piece when we need to finally move it in place down in this cavity surrounding the entire uh building is a bond beam and we were able to put a traditional bond beam like is in any cast and place or or concrete building in place with traditional rebar reinforcement that allows us to tie this floor system into it and build a 3d structure that meets code throughout this in order to support the multiple stories we are adding in additional traditionally poured columns so this little uh push out right here will have sonotube placed down in it it carries the load all the way through the building down to the slab and that's going to bear the weight of both the floor system and the roof truss system when it's put in place so we're not actually relying on the printed material uh for structural properties we know it's strong enough to support stuff but we also know we we need to meet the the code and get these buildings up as quickly as we can so we can't wait for those standards to be made available behind me right here we actually have what's going to be a flower bed and on this project as we topped it out and uh got closer to the top of the building we ran into a problem of a layer time that was actually too short and we had to have the machine crawling along to finish this so having additional pieces that are printed inside the outer walls actually gives you a lot of versatility a to to create more productive assets but also to really hone in your timing on your layers with 3d printed construction the entire industry is in an infancy stage where you need constant research and development these people buy a printer and then they need to figure out what goes on because nobody's ever tried it before so things happen on the job site that are a little bit unexpected hi i'm rafael o'gale part of the nidus team technically head of sales and marketing and also generalist at the startup during this project well you never know what type of problems will come up and uh in this specifically at some point um over the multiple layers that were printing the chain was starting to pop off so my job became becoming the chain resetter um we use this tool to poke the chain back into place and keep printing we're pretty happy with the mix design that we've managed to achieve on this building and there was a huge progression between the last print we did and this one we still have some work to do we think we can get a wall resolution that is much smoother and we're working with a couple new chemical additives that we're going to put in the mix that should help with that and also really perfecting the moisture content so that we don't quite get the tearing that we're experiencing on these really tight corners uh corners that are much larger a lot easier to prevent the tearing and prevent the cracking cracking has not been an issue on this job at all which we're really really happy with and now we can work on some of the fine tuning aspects like getting a better wall resolution one of the unique features of the cobot printer is the fact that it's got a z-axis rotation and that allows for a level of wall smoothing we can put a screed on one side of the nozzle and we're able to get this much smoother finish that you can almost plaster directly onto this is what the concrete looks like without the screed on it it's a lot more common out there and what you would associate with 3d printing now we're at the new knights job site and we're going to go over some of what makes this job unique the lessons they learned from their prior prints and their new mixer pump system they'll be implementing on this two-story house with a basting before we move on to nidus's next big project i have something important to tell you if you're captivated by 3d printed construction check out my course how to 3d print a house at the link in the description it's a four hour series of lectures i designed to share the knowledge i've accumulated traveling to 3d printed projects around the world and interviewing the ceos of the companies that built them this course will set you up with the basic framework that will allow you to approach the 3d printed construction industry with a solid foundation of knowledge soon i'll be adding a section on how to pick a 3d printer and with that will come a major price hike so lock in your lifetime membership now just recently some of the early course members began printing their own homes and i can't wait to visit those projects it's so special to me that i got to be part of their journey this is a new counterweight that we designed and had built and the the rationale behind doing this was to speed up the placement of the z-axis so this is only one part of it uh we have yet to implement a mechanical separation on this section right here you see these spacers are temporary but what this will allow us to do is get an x-axis movement that's mechanical and separate from moving these larger counterweights that are underneath them my name is uh chris i'm the printer operator here at nida's 3d um we operate from under the tent here and i'm sure that uh the print uh goes well uh here on site so this is a strategic location where you can watch everything going on absolutely yeah you want to have uh eyes on uh uh the best view possible of the uh of the job as it's uh as it's ongoing and as we're putting down layers you hear a lot of people say you just click play uh is that the case you do click play but there that's when the fun begins uh depending on environmental and material variables you're you're you're really playing with the extrusion rate to ensure that you uh to ensure the quality of the overall print and to uh allow for success as you build layer upon layer and get higher and higher what might happen that you'd have to get involved on the computer uh you you have to monitor for all sorts of potential faults in the printer and so you're uh you're ensuring that uh mechanically it's running uh well so that emergency stops aren't triggered and that the print can keep going so we're printing the first 3d printed basement in north america uh all of this side is going to be graded once it's printed for the 3d printed basement we're going to leave exit emergency windows above ground since these are going to be livable units for this next project they'll be using a concrete truck instead of mixing their material on site i can't wait to see how it goes thanks for watching and i'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Jarett Gross

Views: 21,725

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Id: F_EJU43igP0

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022