Europe’s first 3D printed building in just 3 days re-printed
Technology with potential
Henrik Lund-Nielsen, CEO of Cobod, explained: “We have said time and time again, that this technology has great potential, is developing very fast and that there is still so much to be learned to fully utilize this technology. Today we provide the documentation for exactly that, by having 3D printed an identical building to The BOD building we did exactly two years ago. Although not everything went as well as expected, the results and improvements we achieved this time speaks for itself”.
Different from other 3D constructing printing providers, Cobod not only has a fine track record of regularly supplying customers with printers, but they have also made it part of their profile to be very open and informative about what they have been doing, including what did not go as planned: To 3D print a building, or more precisely to 3D print the walls of a building, requires not only a 3D construction printer, but also a concrete mixer-pump that can deliver the print materials to the printhead of the printer and a suitable recipe for the print materials. For an optimal print speed and quality all 3 items have to work optimal, which was not entirely the case for Cobod during this re-print of The BOD building.
Print speed of up to 100 cm/s
Michael Holm, Head of R&D at Cobod, explained: “We are extremely pleased with how well our new BOD2 printer performed during this test. The BOD2 3D construction printer has an impressive print speed of up to 100 cm/second, and during this print we could comfortably print with a speed of 35 cm/sec, which is faster than anybody before. However, our concrete mixer-pump could not continuously follow the printer at this speed, so for a lot of the print we actually had to slow down the printer to avoid running out of materials. Hence we are now working with our pump suppliers to overcome this barrier and truly utilize the full speed of our BOD2”.
Henrik Lund-Nielsen concluded the announcement by explaining: “We are now converting the lessons that we learned into even better solutions for our customers going forward. Once we have done that, we believe we could 3D print the entire BOD building in just 8 hours, should we decide to print it again a third time. None the less, this re-print is a significant milestone. A milestone that documents the great potential of 3D construction printing”.