Prvok - Issue on 3D printing concrete building

Abstract

Prvok is the first 3D printed concrete floating house in the Czech republic. Additive manufacturing - 3D printing became a synonym of sustainable building of the 21st century. Its experimental manner and lack of world's standardisation ISO approvals hold the 3D printing concrete method on the edge of usability and applicability and stop a broader spread of application in practice. Furthermore, the used material was newly developed cement composite prefabricated mixture mady by Master Builder Solutions with polypropylene plastic micro-fibres, which was not previously tested in large structures. What we achieved, was a practical realisation of a 3D printed fully equipped and functioning concrete house as a habitable statue for a public event. In order to fulfil the request on insulation and avoiding heat bridges together with investing least material possible, we parametrically designed and implemented a wall system of construction. In order to be able to open the structure to the public, we tested it on the universal loading machines at the Faculty of civil engineering CTU Prague in scale 1:1. Testing fragments of the walls were also part of the research goals, which led us to the final design. In this paper, we present the results of the experiment together with the experimentally obtained data.

Keywords

• 3d printing
• concrete
• prefabricated cement composite
• parametrically designed self load-bearing structure
• static loading tests