Earth, a traditional building material, has been widely used in construction for centuries. With the emergence of cutting-edge technologies such as 3D printing, the scope of contemporary architectural applications of earth has expanded. While 3D printing enables the fabrication of complex forms with less labor-intensive processes, it also retains the advantages of low environmental impact, low cost, and local availability of earth in construction.
On the other hand, despite the advantages of 3D printing, increasing the clay content in earth to enhance extrudability results in decreased compressive strength, as well as increased curing time and shrinkage. Furthermore, compared to traditional earth building techniques, such as rammed earth and adobe bricks, uncompressed earth used during printing has an effect on reducing the water repellency.
In this regard, the 6-week Matter Workshop research explores the potential of material-based stabilization techniques to overcome some of these drawbacks of 3D printing with earth. By using natural additives and fibers as a stabilizer in order to prevent a significant increase in the total embodied carbon and to facilitate the recyclability of earth, results from a series of physical and mechanical performance tests of various earth mixes are investigated.
Learning Objectives
At course completion the student will:
- To understand how different additives and fibers interact with 3D print earth material by evaluating material compatibilities for improving distribution, and cohesion.
- To assess how the addition of fibers and additives influences the physical performance; shrinkage percentage, drying speed, printability, and mechanical performance; WDPT, compression and tensile strength of various earth mixes.
- To validate observational data findings through empirical test results.
- To learn to set up a “controlled experiment” and to collect numerical data.
- To be able gain experience of analyzing and comparing different outcomes of experiments by dealing with parallel datasets.
