Through Textile to Reinforced 3D Concrete Printing (2023-06)¶

The extrusion-based 3D concrete printing (3DCP) technology holds the potential to increase the productivity in the construction industry up to 10 times in comparison to the traditional production methods. Additionally, 3DCP creates safe working conditions, reduces construction time as well as costs, and allows design flexibility in the architecture. However, realizing a reliable 3DCPsystem, especially for on-site applications, is still technically challenging. It is still a partially manual and time-intensive process, and environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity influence the process quality. There are no standardized techniques and guidelines for quality control, so the essential data on structural performance is limited. Legal regulations and general building approvals do not exist. There is still no standard approach for the reinforcement integration in 3DCP. This study offers the integration of grid-like textile structures into the 3DCP to reinforce the 3D printed concrete structures. Due to the non-corrosiveness of the textile grid a thick concrete cover is not required. As a result, thin construction is feasible and, through the lightweight of the concrete layers, printing of the higher walls is possible. The concrete printing occurs through the textile mesh. The printed concrete is pressed back by using a moveable formwork, thus a complete embedding of the reinforcement and a high surface quality on one side of the concrete element are ensured. The process characteristics and the structural performance of the realized concrete elements are discussed in this paper.