Features of the First 3D Printed Building erected in Dubai
The newly invented technology (3D printing) has got its first public application in the construction and engineering section in Dubai.
According to the report revealed by World Economic Forum, the 3D printing technology has been used recently to erect a two story building in Dubai.
In case you do not understand what this awesome technology means, 3D printing a.k.a. additive manufacturing is a production of physical material from a graphically-designed object in the 3D software. This process involves continuous adding of the required raw materials in the physical production process until the actual shape of the intended object is produced.
In other words, there will be a steady flow of materials in accordance with the pattern used in drawing the 3D object until the entire shape of the object has been covered and intended object shape achieved.
3D printing has become a modern pattern of manufacturing of some objects with intricate shapes and gradually gaining adoption by giant manufacturing companies. 3D printing holds lots of promise for future manufacturing.
In addition to its manufacturing usefulness, little has been tried in other areas of application especially in the building and construction industry until the recent revelation from Dubai construction firm who implemented the 3D printing technology to ascertain its possibility in erecting a building.
Surprisingly, the 3D printing was successfully used to erect a two-story building flawlessly. This actually implies that the whole building concretes walls where raise through additive process with less human input. It is a process that will likely produce highly homogeneous concrete wall with high structural integrity against cracks and other possible challenges.
Usually the building and construction is a section of engineering that requires high number of human workers due to the high task in the labor, physical controls of intended designs, and use of human efforts to actualize intended design/plan. A typical building site for a two-story building could consist of over 20 human workers carrying out varying tasks at the same time to actual the single goal of bring the building plan into physical reality. The use of 3D printing technology in this sector significantly reduced the number of human workers involve in the building process to less than 50 percent. This implies that less than ten persons could be use to achieve same purpose since the 3D printing technology is in use.
For the first time the 3D printing is tried for building purpose it proofed to be of great use to the industry. This points to other possibilities of the 3D printing technology in the future and the possible dominance in future engineering processes.
