B4 - Final Project Topic - Taylor Castonguay

For our final project, my team will be writing a research paper on the 3-D printing of building materials. 3-D printing is becoming more and more popular and one of the newest topics with it is the 3-D printing of materials used in the building process. The building industry is such a huge part of our economy and the 3-D printing of materials could greatly affect many blue collar workers by taking away their jobs. But, this process could greatly increase the efficiency and decrease the time is takes for buildings to be created. This could also decrease the amount of money spent during the building process.

One popular building material that already is being 3-D printed is concrete. You can visualize the 3-D printing of concrete in the figure above. In China, there have been many homes that have been made out of entirely 3-D printed concrete. They even have began making homes from recycled concrete, which I think is really awesome. The more efficient and resource saving the building process is, the more I am interested in it! I can't wait to learn more about this and the other materials that engineers and scientists are looking into for our future. One day, I believe so many other building materials will have the ability to be 3-D printed. The general outline of our project is as follows:

• Abstract
• Summarization of our research findings & conclusions.  
• Introduction
• Introduce project & idenify 3-D Printing of building materials such as concrete.
• History
• Brief history of 3-D printing and how it has advanced over time.
• Topic 1: Technological aspects of 3-D printing concrete
• Topic 2: Current applications of 3-D printing using concrete and tying in sustainability concepts
• Topic 3: Economical Effects/Social Repercussions
• Future Opportunities
• Concrete printing in the future
• Larger Scale
• Expanding to other materials
• Conclusion

Comments on other projects:

When I read about Ami Amegan, Zilong Xiao, and Yu-Sen Liu's project, I was very intrigued. They are creating a model of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Revit. This almost makes me wish I was working on a project in Revit because I love working with the program so much. Although I feel pretty comfortable with it now, I believe it is something that you could keep learning about forever. There are so many features to Revit and I am excited for them to become more comfortable with it, too.

Another project I found very interesting was J Schwakoff's topic about Automatic Fault Detection and Diagnosis (AFDD) of HVAC systems. Being an architectural engineering major with an HVAC concentration, this topic is very interesting to me. So much energy is lost in buildings due to faults in HVAC systems. I am a firm believer in saving a much energy as possible in buildings not only for energy costs, but to be environmentally conscious. I think that these automatic fault detection systems could be a great help in the building industry and help save a lot of wasted energy.

Dmitriy Voznyak's group is using Revit to be able to increase the detail of their senior design project. They not only are making a Revit model to display the way their building looks, but they are also going to try to incorporate scheduling, structure, and MEP. I think that this is a great way to make their senior design project better!