Go Big or Go Home – Printing Concrete Buildings

When people think of modernization, the first industry that comes to mind is often not construction, an industry that has been slow to adopt new technologies for reasons spanning from liability to cost effectiveness. On the other hand, additive manufacturing is an agile and ever-changing field, built on iterations of designs and printers. The combination of these seemingly opposite-styled fields, construction and additive manufacturing, into the subject area of additive construction, provides an avenue for construction to take advantage of the rapid development that has persisted in the field of additive manufacturing over the last decade. When scaling the technology of additive manufacturing to additive construction, the common viewpoint is to design a scale model, prove it works, and then build a bigger version of it. However, there is an inherent flaw with this mentality as this can lead printers of this scale to be too expensive and difficult to operate. This chapter follows the advancements of the additive construction team led by Megan Kreiger at the US Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. Megan chose to tackle this problem in a different way during the development of field deployable applications for the US military.