The City of Nome and its partners are planning to construct an experimental home in the summer using a robot which prints concrete.
They hope that the project can demonstrate that technology can reduce the time and expense for building quality housing even in Alaska’s remote communities, where it is expensive to construct and housing shortages persist.
The 3D printing process used for the construction of the home is coming from 3600 miles away located in Pennsylvania. Entrepreneurs and researchers on the campus of Penn State University have built an early model of this system. They’ll utilize this, and a different version, called Nome to print the unused areas of an entire home.
“We are interested in printing everything from the foundation, the walls, and the roofs, through finding and creating the technology for printing vaults and domes,” explained Penn State architecture and engineering Professor Jose Duarte. He is a member of Penn State’s Additive Construction Lab and its spinoff company, X-Hab 3D.
The transportation of building equipment and workers away from the roads can be expensive. The short construction and shipping seasons create a problem for logistics. In certain communities, the materials need to be stored in the winter due to the lack of time to construct following the delivery.
Theoretically 3D concrete printing systems provide huge competitive advantages under the constraints of construction in Alaska’s rural areas and logistics issues.
Here’s why. Penn State’s system consists of three primary pieces that can fit into the 20-foot shipping container. An concrete mixer a pump, and an enormous bright orange robot arm with 12 feet of reach. The robot arm is positioned on the mobile platform.
“Our present system we’ve created for X-Hab 3D is a mobile 3D concrete printer for the expedition,” said Penn State Engineering Professor Sven Bilen, who’s also part of the team. “It’s mounted on tanks tracks. It’s capable of rolling out of the container and then move around the area using the tank tracks.”
Once it is in position the robot arm is able to hold an extruder vertically, similar to a pen, and puts down an even, smooth stream of concrete with precisely-designed patterns. As the ropes are stacked into layers, a 3D design takes shape.
Without molds to hold the concrete’s softness it’s engineering work to create shapes that be created as they should rather than being a loose messy mess. Duarte explained that the system needs to take into account the specific characteristics of the concrete mix, and how the concrete is shaped as it layers are added, and even the way that temperature affects curing time.
“So when you travel to the area that’s very cold, for instance, are aware of the situation in Alaska or to a location that’s extremely hot, such as the desert, you alter the environmental conditions,” he said. “But with this platform, you’ll be in a position to utilize the same rules, the same kind of analysis tools for simulation to figure out the most appropriate setting for the particular setting. So, in a nutshell it’s an idea we’re looking to test.”
This Penn State team says it isn’t yet ready to reveal details regarding their project at Nome at this time, but their previous studies were part of an 2021 feasibility study of 3D-printed housing in the rural areas of Alaska. The study revealed a lot of advantages over traditional homebuilding.
Traditional builders will require up to three months for things that the 3D printing technology could accomplish in just the span of one or three days.
A large portion of the sand and gravel that is used in various concrete mixes can be sourced locally that means massive savings in time and money and a smaller carbon footprint.
The study states that the homes will withstand snowfalls, frosty Heaves and extreme winds as well as earthquakes. They should also last longer and require less maintenance than a standard home.
The savings on costs are potentialy significant. Based on prior pandemic Fairbanks marketplace data researchers concluded that constructing the concrete house costs about one-fourth the price of an average home would.
And Duarte stated that because the various building components are built electronically, more mass customization is feasible. This is good for aesthetics. Buildings don’t have to be identical copies to cut costs.
However, there are benefits that can be realized as well. Duarte claimed that artificial intelligence could create design solutions that are suited to specific construction sites, family needs, the local raw materials available, and the range of anticipated weather conditions.
“So you can customize the building materials to improve their efficiency,” Duarte said. “Because there are extremely harsh conditions, it’s harder to come up with solutions that work and that’s the reason you should use this type of technology. We search in environments where the conditions were difficult to work in.”
A lot of attention is at this Nome project. It is the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. and Denali Commission paid for the feasibility study.
“There’s certain Alaska-specific issues to this,” said AHFC CEO Bryan Butcher. “But it’s interesting to take a look and examine if there’s a problem we can overcome, as if we can construct high-energy efficient homes in remote Alaska at a cost that is affordable this could change the game.”
The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development recently granted Nome and its collaborators a $600,000 grant to build the demonstration construction.
Nome is donating land. Municipal Manager Glenn Steckman shared his own housing situation. He lives in an older 900 square-foot home that he says “tilts just a bit” for $2,000 per month with the cost of utilities.
“On the other hand, Nome has been working to encourage people to take down their old homes or seek to fix it,” Steckman said. “But certain housing isn’t worth being saved. We need to bring more housing in the area as well as quality as well as safe housing. It’s been a top prioritization for the past four years I’ve been the city director at Nome.”
Steckman hopes that the house for demonstration is one of the many. The city expects the demand for housing to grow as construction of the port megaproject is underway along with healthcare facilities are expanded.
Bilen at Penn State said right now the 3D printing market isn’t actually there. The team’s story of origin dates back to 2015 when the team came together to participate in the NASA contest to create 3D printed homes for Mars. In the present on Earth the building codes, as well as regulatory agencies have some caught up.
However, Bilen believes the technology has the potential to be commercialized in a wide range of applications that go far beyond housing. As with sewers, cable housings and even artificial reefs to reduce coastal erosion.
“And as these applications expand with more uses for this, I’m sure we’ll see 3D concrete printing take off,” Bilen said.
