From: The Verge
By Jeff Blagdon
Enrico Dini is the man
behind Monolite UK, a company that hopes to start producing and selling
3D printers under the name D-Shape. However, Dini's printers aren't for
printing Minecraft creations, Verge logos, or even prosthetic jaws — they're for printing buildings.
As it stands, if you want to
make a complex structure out of something like stone, you need to build
with Portland cement — a messy, time consuming, labor intensive and
error-prone business. D-Shape's printers simplify things, using a
computer-driven printer to turn a CAD model into a real structure one
layer at a time. The new building method makes it easy to reproduce
features like domes without any of the complicated forming needed for
concrete. As a matter of fact, unlike similar technologies from the
likes of Loughborough University in the UK, no cement is necessary at
all — D-Shape's printers use a special inorganic binder and ordinary
sand as the only raw materials. The non-epoxy binder is composed of two
parts — sand is mixed with a solid catalyst, and the mixture is then
exposed to a liquid binding agent. The surplus sand that doesn't get
printed acts to buttress the structure, and can be reused for the next
print.
Interestingly, the sand isn't
inert during the reaction like it is when concrete is mixed, and
Monolite claims the finished product is a hard, strong, marble-like
material — ideal for everything from park benches to one or two floor
buildings. So far, the biggest structure Dini has built is the gazebo
pictured at the top of the page (the picture above is of a scale model),
but with a rigid enough printer structure there's nothing to stop him
from printing something much larger, and his current goal is to create a
"yard" printer for use on actual construction sites.
As exciting as the project is,
the journey hasn't been for Dini, and Filmmakers Jack Wake-Walker and
Marc Webb are working on turning his story into a documentary. The film,
titled The Man who Prints Houses, looks at Dini's life and his struggle to bring large-scale 3D printing to reality.
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