My name is Aiman Hussein, and I am the director of
3D printing at Alquist. Here at Alquist, we
focus on printing homes that are affordable in the community and for people in the area. We range between 1,500 square feet and 1,300 for a single family. We use large-scale
construction 3D printers to be able to create affordable housing in rural and unserved areas. So, when we arrive on site, we typically work on a
slab or a ribbon footing. And what we do is we set the printer up around where the house is going to go. We typically have around five or six pieces of equipment, and that is printer, and we also have a control panel to operate and monitor the print settings. Then on the material side we have a silo, which holds the dry material, but directly below that
we have a mixing system and a pumping system. The water is added in that process and pumped through a hose, which then feeds the printer material. This process isn't very different than a typical desktop 3D printer. What you do is you start your design stage and you create a CAD file that basically tells the machine where to go and how fast to do it
and how much material to let out in that specific spot. And so the program is the centerline of where the nozzle is, and the printer will follow that line throughout the whole process. The way the printer reads,
it's a cross section. So if you were to draw this up, and you'd cut out a very
thin line of that object, that's what the machine sees, and it sees a bunch of those over and over and over
again to complete the house. The two rails, if you will, those provide your outer
bounds for your wall. And so in that middle portion is where you can run
electrical, your plumbing. In a sense we are like a framing company. However, we're much more
of a hands-on system, where we construct all the walls and then we guide the
GCs through installing the doors, windows, HVAC,
and plumbing systems. You're doing the house, and you have to leave
cavities for your two doors. What happens is it kind of splits that house into two wall sections, left of the door and right of the door. And what it'll do is it'll
do that wall section, it'll lift up, go to the
other side of the door, and complete that other wall section. And then once you're
at the top of the door, what we do is we add a, I refer to it as a manual support, and so what we do is we add a steel lintel that stretches across that window or door, and then the printer
then continues printing directly over top that system. Each house consists of around 150 layers. Each layer is approximately three-quarters of an inch thick, and so that makes a standard 9-foot wall. Based on our current mixed design, each layer takes around five to 10 minutes before we add another layer on top of it. So that's the layer set time, until it's hard enough
to be able to hold weight for another layer to be added. And then we try to hold
off for around two weeks before any large load-bearing weight, such as a roof system, be added. And concrete reaches the
max strength at 28 days. Nozzle design is really customizable, especially in the
3D-construction industry. There's the squared-off nozzle, where it has a flat aesthetic. And then there's the rounder nozzle that leaves a more of a bead look. They have the same properties as far as structural design. It's more of aesthetic finish. With the printed system, if you wanted a more structural or more
ballistic-based wall, you could increase the
concrete in that wall system by increasing the nozzle thickness. What we have is, on this specific nozzle, the back end of the nozzle has a raking system. And so as it goes, it
provides those grooves, and that's just the indicator of making sure you're at that right height and allowing the next layer to smooth it directly over top. The process and way it's done, very similar to a brick-laying system, where you would go around and you do one layer of bricks, and then once that layer's finished, you go to the next one. It's very similar in that process. However, the building materials and the labor-intensive portion of that is obviously different. 3D-printed homes allow
for quicker construction that are also less expensive and more durable over
a long period of time. Since we have those two withes, all our homes are
considered thermally broken, which allows for less utility cost to maintain the home. One of the main questions that I get on my TikTok
or personal interactions is the replacing of manual labor and people leaving without jobs. And just want to address that here, is this technology we see as the answer to and not the cause of the
national job shortage. We are committed to locally hire crews to run our machines. So if we go into a community, we hire from within that town, train them on the printer, and they become our
print crew in the area. And just like any automation company, it's our duty to replace any jobs lost through the process. And so we are working
with a lot of universities across the country to create a job force development program to train people on this new system in this very new industry.
