Dive Brief:

• A team of masters' students, who call themselves "Amalgamma," from the Bartlett School of Architecture, has developed a 3-D printing method for concrete, which enables the creation of structural elements and large furniture pieces, Dezeen Magazine reported.
• In a year-long project called Fossilised, Amalgamma combined two existing 3-D methods, extrusion and powder printing, to create supported extrusions. The team built a table and a column in an attempt to demonstrate their ability to produce large-scale concrete structures.
• Amalgamma extrudes ready-mix concrete from an industrial robotic arm layer by layer, laying it over a bed of granular support material, which is placed around the structure by a second toolhead on the same robotic arm, Dezeen reported. A binder used during extrusion hardens certain parts of the granular support, producing a multi-material piece that takes between six and 10 hours to complete.

Dive Insight:

In the past, the group says, concrete 3-D printing has produced straight, vertical forms, so one of their goals was to bring craftsmanship into the architectural design of the pieces, as well as develop printing methods that did not require a 3-D printer larger than the structure being built, Dezeen reported.

The team said this is no different than when traditional construction elements are manufactured elsewhere and then assembled on site. So while building an entire large-scale structure might be challenging currently, Amalgamma believes their method could be used to print floor-wall-ceiling assemblies or stair-floor-wall components in "one whole architectural chunk."

Research teams all over the world have been shooting for bigger and better 3-D printed structures ever since the technology was developed.

The gigantic WASP Big Delta and the more compact and portable Apis Cor were developed to build houses on the fly, and proponents say they can help produce emergency shelter during natural disasters. Even Austrian architect Wolf D. Prix has said that 3-D printing and robotics are the future of the construction industry, particularly when it comes to offsite manufacturing and onsite assembly of larger structures.

In addition, Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have developed a new concrete printer they say can produce concrete prints as large as 36 feet long, 16 feet wide and 13 feet high.  Even wood has gotten in on the act with a Swedish team working on a process to 3-D print wood pieces.