The Vulcan 3D printed home construction system is comprised of the Vulcan printer and the Magma portable mixing unit that prepares ICON’s proprietary building material, Lavacrete, for printing. All of this hardware is driven by the BuildOS software suite. BuildOS generates and prepares architecture for printing, then controls the robotic hardware on-site to turn digital plans into physical homes.
The Vulcan is ICON Builds third generation, large-scale 3D-printer system for additive construction. The current Vulcan system is 1.5x larger, 2x faster than our previous generation and capable of printing homes and structures up to 3,000 square feet without relocation. The Vulcan can produce resilient, single-story homes faster than conventional methods and with less waste and more design freedom.
Magma is a smart, portable factory that feeds a Vulcan printer with material to print a home. Intelligent and working in perfect sync with a Vulcan printer on-site, Magma takes the guesswork out of complex, high-performance cementitious material.
The Magma system feeds Vulcan printers with ICON’s advanced cement-based material, Lavacrete. Using any of ICON’s proprietary Lavacrete blends, the Magma system mixes Lavacrete, additives, and water automatically, depending on current site weather conditions, then supplies the ready-to-print Lavacrete to the Vulcan. Think of Magma as an extremely smart print cartridge, super-sized for home construction.
NASA has provided funding to ICON to develop 3D printing of buildings for the moon and Mars.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I take it the intercavity space can be backfilled with foam insulation?
If tesla bots or equivalent succeed, it will lower the workforce price, hence building-printers won´t be the future.
Most 3d printed materials of this sort are good only in compression: The enormous number of internal seams make them weak in tension.
The problem with is on airless bodies like the Moon is that the primary structural load IS tension.
You could, of course, solve that by building vaults and domes, and then burying them under enough regolith to counter the internal pressure. The problem with that approach is that “enough regolith to counter the internal pressure” is a LOT of regolith. You have to move a ridiculous amount of material around.
Alternatively, you could build the vaults and domes, and just use them to shelter otherwise fragile balloons; The structural mass of a large balloon capable of supporting atmospheric pressure is roughly comparable to the mass of the air it contains, fairly modest.
I think that’s probably a feasible approach. You could leave enough room between the vault and dome structure and the balloon for maintenance crews to work on the exterior of the balloon.
Well, I suppose you might use 3d printed partitions, inside the balloons; They’d be useful to hold up the balloon in case of a puncture.
I kinda love these printed houses just for the fact that doors, windows, will likely be plumb. I like the rounded edges too. I’m not sure how applicable it is to building on the moon since you couldn’t use concrete in the vacuum. To actually use molten rock would be energy intensive and require some interesting tooling – maybe laser-sintered powder, but still a lot of power.
Of course six Central-American masons can build a home out of blocks quicker than the printer, and for les$.