Three-Dimensional (3D) Printing for Building and Construction (2022-07)¶

The world of construction lags behind manufacturing, agriculture, and wholesale/retail in terms of productivity over the last few centuries. Although the productivity of farming and production has increased 1015 times in the past 80 years, construction remains stuck at the same pace as the 1950s, i.e., at about 1% per annum. The growth of automation in construction has been slow despite construction being one of the largest industries in the world economy, which contributes approximately 13% of GDP or US$10 trillion globally. Construction remains manual mainly due to the deeper cyclical nature of the industry, which makes long-term investments untenable and the flexible use of labor/migrant labor more attractive. In contrast, the use of automation, sensing, and digital technologies have been widely adopted in manufacturing and other industries. The construction industry faces various significant challenges. These challenges include increasing labor efficiency and decreasing accident rates at construction sites. Because of some conditions on the building sites that workers face, including dangerous fixtures or inclement weather conditions, the construction industry has the highest rate of work-related injuries (59 per 1000 workers, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics). Another consideration is the production of traditional cement contributes about 5% to the carbon in the atmosphere. Moreover, a large shift in climate change worsening will require a significant reduction in these polluting substances, which new technology and sustainable materials are needed; moreover, modern buildings and housing are mainly built with concrete. More than 20 billion tons of concrete are consumed every year, second only to water in usage. Three-dimensional (3D) printing can automatically produce complex shape geometries without any dies, fixtures, and tooling from a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model. 3D printing (3DP) for building and construction is a potential solution to the construction industry’s problems. The technique will also allow architects to produce more creative designs for new structures without considering the building procedure. Due to its significant advantages of fabricating functional products with minimum material wastage, less human intervention, and reasonable build time, 3DP today has already been applied to other industries. Furthermore, researchers are looking forward to more applications of 3DP in building and construction to improve traditional building strategies while reducing material waste, human resources, and high capital investments in the built environment. Research interest to employ 3DP for building and construction has significantly increased in the past few years [1].