A 3D Printed House Idea for Carbon
The 3D Printing Company
Ideas are easy. I’ve heard it many times. I guess they are. But this is an idea that can repurpose existing technology from Carbon to create something even better. Or at least I think it might. It would not be easy to do, but it might be worth it. And it would be much easier for Carbon to do than for me, since I know very little about 3D printing, and they are a huge player in the space.
I just watched a video from TechCrunch about them. Very good.
Here’s a key slide from the video:
What happens with their polymer process right now is they beam light into the liquid and it cures while the hardened object is being pulled up out of the wet liquid that the hardened object is being formed out of. Super cool. I hope you watch the whole video. It’s only just over 5 minutes and there were no ads or anything like that for me, although the whole thing is sort of like an ad for Carbon… which is fine by me because the technology is so cool.
This fast manufacturing process seems perfect for 3D printing homes. Creating parts of homes would be easy. They can do it with their 3D printers right now. But they could only be pretty small, and they’d have to be shipped to a home’s final build site.
Ideally they could have a huge 3D printer on the build site, but how do they remove the printer afterwards, since it’s under the house? And how do they lift up a house that weighs so much? In other words, I don’t think a 3D printer that big would be feasible because it wouldn’t be transportable.
But, here’s how they could do it:
At the base of the house, with the space for the foundation already dug out, they would but a watertight base and thin, watertight walls around the edges of foundation that would go up a few feet. The walls would be a few feet out from where the sides of the foundation and the house will ultimately be. The foundation would slope down slightly toward the middle so that liquid would run down toward the middle. At the bottom of the middle there would be a sump pump to send liquid down through a pipe that goes under and out from the foundation and sends it back up next to the foundation for later use.
A single large robotic arm (or multiple) would shoot one or a few streams of liquid polymer up and out, starting at the base of the house, and working all around and up. As the stream reaches its apex, a projector above the arm would send a beam of light through the polymer to the point where the polymer needs to be hardened to create structure for the house. This process is continued, and excess polymer liquid is sump pumped back to the robotic arm until the whole house is complete.
That’s it. I’m guessing this process could be made more simple if the polymer liquid was really cheap. In that case, you follow the same process, except you need no robotic arm, only a projector that rises as it can shine over a whole layer of the house. You build up strong enough, temporary walls just beyond the ultimate bounds of the sides of the house. Then, you sinly slowly fill the whole massive container with the polymer liquid. As your filling it, the projector is being risen higher as it projects and sets more and more of the liquid into the solid components of the house. Layer by layer the house goes up. As the house is going up, small, temporary support structures jutting our from the house can connect to the container walls so that it doesn’t burst or leak from the pressure of all of the liquid in in.
This process could easily be used to build a massive, skinny tower. It could also be used to build a skyscraper. Once built, the sump pump takes out all of the excess liquid polymer solution, to be put in tanker trucks for the next project.
Tons of possibilities here. Perhaps nothing novel or unique. But hopefully it inspires Carbon or another 3D printing company to start working on 3D printed homes. Combining cheap, advanced polymers with and extremely strong, durable lattice could make a home that is a small fraction of the cost of today’s homes, as well as stronger and with more interesting shape possibilities. If building a whole community, once finished with one house, you could simply pump the reservoir of unused liquid polymer from the finished house the the next, unfinished house. And then to the next house, and so on until the whole community is built. You could also pipe this stuff into somewhere, instead of sticking it in, if that would be cheaper.
This could also be used to create any object that is heavier than the would like to lift. And it might be cheaper to not have to lift up every item that they print while printing it.
