About D-Shape
3D printing
Enrico Dini is the man behind Monolite UK, a company that hopes to start producing and selling 3D printers under the name D-Shape. However, Dini’s printers aren’t for printing small things — they’re for printing buildings.
As it stands, if you want to make a complex structure out of something like stone, you need to build with Portland cement — a messy, time consuming, labor intensive and error-prone business. D-Shape’s printers simplify things, using a computer-driven printer to turn a CAD model into a real structure one layer at a time. The new building method makes it easy to reproduce features like domes without any of the complicated forming needed for concrete. As a matter of fact, unlike similar technologies from the likes of Loughborough University in the UK, no cement is necessary at all — D-Shape’s printers use a special inorganic binder and ordinary sand as the only raw materials. The non-epoxy binder is composed of two parts — sand is mixed with a solid catalyst, and the mixture is then exposed to a liquid binding agent. The surplus sand that doesn’t get printed acts to buttress the structure, and can be reused for the next print.
Interestingly, the sand isn’t inert during the reaction like it is when concrete is mixed, and Monolite claims the finished product is a hard, strong, marble-like material — ideal for everything from park benches to one or two floor buildings. So far, the biggest structure Dini has built is the “Radiolaria”, but with a rigid enough printer structure there’s nothing to stop him from printing something much larger, and his current goal is to create a “yard” printer for use on actual construction sites.
As exciting as the project is, the journey hasn’t been for Dini, and Filmmakers Jack Wake-Walker and Marc Webb are working on turning his story into a documentary. The film, titled The Man who Prints Houses, looks at Dini’s life and his struggle to bring large-scale 3D printing to reality. Was be in Puglia for study the apulian “trullo” the old stone house of the farmers.
Enrico Dini wants to print houses in the Italian countryside and moon bases for the European Spaces Agency. He wants to solidify a desert sand dune and supply the spires and columns to complete the Sagrada Família. But what he wants even more is to legitimize and standardize 3D printing as a building technology—a massive endeavor which has consumed his life. That’s the story behind “The Man Who Prints Houses”, a new documentary that “delves into the troubled mind of a genius intent on changing the world forever.” Dini, a former roboticist-turned-engineer and designer, has made his name with his developments in 3D printing, work best encapsulated by his great invention, D-Shape—the largest printer in the world which Dini built from scratch. Aside from its daunting size, the most important innovation behind D-Shape lies in its printing technique, which alternately spreads and stacks layers of sand and binding materials to make instant sandstone that Dini says is more durable than concrete and does not require steel reinforcements.Innovation, however, comes at a price. Dini’s personal life has been uprooted by the gambles he has taken on his business. A series of investments meant to see the project through disappeared when the crash beckoned in 2008, forcing Dini to rebuild his entire enterprise. He would become divorced and left estranged from his son in the process. All the more reason, then, to make sure he realized his life’s work. Towards that end, Dini has worked with architects like Norman Foster, administrators, and contractors to develop prototypes and carry out test trials that has produced, among other things, the world’s largest printed structure. As for the Sagrada Família, he still has some time to make his case.
