How to you print big structures?

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Jacob barhak

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Sep 16, 2014, 1:14:48 AM9/16/14
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Hi All,

There was a news item last year about an architect planning to print a house. I posted it to this list.

There must be many advantages to that over regular construction. However, even storing slices needed to print in memory is not trivial.

How much memory, computing power, and printers do you need for that?

Anyone in this group has an idea how this can be implemented. Will AMF have an advantage for such a task?

It would be nice to get your opinions.

Jacob

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Markus Hitter

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Sep 16, 2014, 4:41:56 AM9/16/14
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Am 16.09.2014 um 07:14 schrieb Jacob barhak:
> There must be many advantages to that over regular construction.

Also a big disadvantage: you apply material very slowly, compared to pouring concrete into a mold.

> However, even storing slices needed to print in memory is not
> trivial.

What makes you think this is the case? A flat wall can be described with two triangles, no matter wether this wall is 10 mm or 10 meters.


Markus Hitter

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Jacob barhak

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Sep 16, 2014, 1:17:45 PM9/16/14
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So Markus,

Your answer limits us to what is regular today. Rectangular houses with known building techniques.

What about a printed curve looking structure?

What about printing tunnels in the walls or even wiring of different materials. Does current technology already allow it? Are there any advantages in that beyond the obvious?

My question was more towards what is missing technology-wise to accomplish such a task.

Surely members of this group are interested in use of technology discussed here. Let is figure out when it fits best.

Jacob

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Gilman, Charles R (GE Global Research)

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Sep 16, 2014, 1:45:36 PM9/16/14
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Jacob,

This is an open-ended question which is difficult to answer in the general case. I'll limit my comments to AMF vs. STL.

A lot depends on what you are trying to build and what AM technologies you are using. Today, most building are created using AM and they tend to use electronic or paper blueprints rather than STL of AMF. In the future, how much of the blueprint functionality would AMF need to replace?

As Markus pointed out, the file size is driven by the geometric complexity of the building, not the size. In this instance, AMF does not have a significant advantage over STL. AMF has smaller file sizes than STL, but not enough to eliminate STL as a medium for transmitting architectural solids.

In my opinion, AMF has no significant advantages over STL with respect to internal passages of cavities.

In my opinion, AMF also has no significant advantages over STL for printing curved surfaces.

In my opinion, AMF has a significant advantage over STL if you have solids in the model that you need to build with different materials. This is pretty common in the building industry.

Another area AMF has a significant advantage over STL is AMF contains topology. Because buildings are very large and have very thin walls, the disconnected triangles of STL can kind of switch from the inside of the wall to the outside the wall because of tolerances in the modeler.This causes a lot of model repair. Because AMF has built in topology, the triangles are connected and have a harder time slipping from inside to outside the building walls.

As for wiring, plumbing, HVAC, etc. -- would you even need those in the future?
Shouldn't the building of the future generate its own electricity, heating, cooling, water, and waste disposal in situ?

STL has no capability to replace a blueprint to define building systems.

In my opinion, AMF is also not well suited for building systems (electrical, plumbing, HVAC, etc.). AMF does a good job representing the shape, but AMF's scope does not include the kind of semantic information necessary to evaluate and or construct the building systems. You can represent notes in AMF, but I would need to be convinced that the notes in AMF could completely replace the information in drawings.

Charles

Markus Hitter

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Sep 16, 2014, 5:05:35 PM9/16/14
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Am 16.09.2014 um 19:45 schrieb Gilman, Charles R (GE Global Research):
> In my opinion, AMF also has no significant advantages over STL for
> printing curved surfaces.

In opposite to STL, AMF allows curved surfaces at all. Pretty big advantage, IMHO, even when it's not well supported in applications, yet.

That said, I don't think the file format is a noticeable limitation to such printing processes. They likely have a lot of more serious problems to solve.


Markus
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