Having been in the industry for 25 years and pretty much seen everything it takes a lot to impress Materialise CEO Fried Vancraen in the world of 3D printing. His keynote address yesterday pointed out how tiresome he finds the amount of small FDM printers printing useless objects. But, Fried was suitably impressed with one fellow TCT Asia exhibitor to dedicate a portion of his talk to their efforts.
That exhibitor is Winsun - the Chinese company who have made mainstream news in the quick construction of 3D printed houses, apartment blocks and villas. Fried said of the company: "This is a truly innovative use for 3D printing, there are few high value 3D printed products but the fact that Winsun uses recycled material, is low cost and is protected by 98 patents means there is potential to create a really valuable 3D printed product for the world."
Esteemed 3D Printing consultant Graham Tromans concurred with Fried on the prospect of quickly produced 3D printed houses, stating yesterday: "Imagine a natural disaster zone, which leaves hundreds or thousands of displaced people displaced from their homes with, technology like this could create instant infrastructure for the affected areas."
Paying a visit to the Winsun booth at TCT Asia sheds some light on their developments, which have been in the makings since 2002. The original concept behind Winsun was to create new eco-friendly materials for use in the construction industry. The creation of six material including CRG,(Special fibre glass reinforced gypsum board) which is now used in 95% of theatres across China.
The development of these materials coincided with thoughts of 3D printing and the company set about building a 3D printer to handle their new materials in 2004. Ten years down the line and the company were throwing up ten 3D printed houses all printed with their patent pending 3D printer head with automatic feeding.
The items on their stand show the full range of materials including the incredibly named Crazy Magic Stone. Just by looking at the objects it is easy to understand the process for printing the houses. The printer head, like a giant FDM machine, extrudes the material around steel reinforcement poles that have been cemented in the ground. For insulation the printed material is filled in with tightly packed polystyrene and the rough printed parts can be nicely finished using traditional moulding methods.
Without actually seeing the parts it was difficult to either understand how Winsun could achieve what they claimed to have achieved but here in the flesh it is easy to see that this may well be the future of construction. China are leading the way.
