Building Additive Manufacturing – A Materials Evaluation

The United Kingdom is in a grip of a housing crisis, a recent report from the House of Lords stated that affordable housing in Britain is a “modern plague” that could jeopardize our standards of living for future generations. This paper attempts to impact the problem of housing shortage by evaluating the potential of implementing fast Building Additive Manufacturing (BAM) as a construction process. To validate the feasibility of BAM as a building process a variety of compressive and slump test were conducted to assess the capabilities of concrete paste as a layer by layer build material. A structure was fabricated to represent a FFF based BAM Process, the tests determined that nozzle design limitations, flowability of concrete and resistance to slump are key material characteristics in constructing house structural elements. Furthermore, the use of recyclable natural and steel-wool fibres didn’t contribute to a mixture's compressive strength but did significantly increase its flexural strength.