Metal 3D printing in construction: A review of methods, research, applications, opportunities and challenges

By C. Buchanan, L. Gardner. Engineering structures, 2019

696 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract 3D printing, more formally known as additive manufacturing (AM), has the potential to revolutionise the construction industry, with foreseeable benefits including greater structural efficiency, reduction in material consumption and wastage, streamlining and expedition of the design-build process, enhanced customisation, greater architectural freedom and improved accuracy and safety on-site. Unlike traditional manufacturing methods for construction products, metal 3D printing offers ready opportunities to create non-prismatic sections, internal stiffening, openings, functionally graded elements, variable microstructures and mechanical properties through controlled heating and cooling and thermally-induced prestressing. Additive manufacturing offers many opportunities for the construction sector, but there will also be fresh challenges and demands, such as the need for more digitally savvy engineers, greater use of advanced computational analysis and a new way of thinking for the design and verification of structures, with greater emphasis on inspection and load testing. It is envisaged that AM will complement, rather than replace, conventional production processes, with clear potential for hybrid solutions and structural strengthening and repairs. These opportunities and challenges are explored in this paper as part of a wider review of different methods of metal 3D printing, research and early applications of additive manufacturing in the construction industry. Lessons learnt for metal 3D printing in construction from additive manufacturing using other materials and in other industries are also presented.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Building and Construction, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/096b727bf151cb507493840c5ad158cb648f3120

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Citations in the corpus

Laser powder bed fusion for metal additive manufacturing: perspectives on recent developments (2020, methodology): “AM techniques are categorised into seven groups (Lee et al. 2018) and metal AM involves techniques from six of these categories and details have been reviewed elsewhere (Gisario et al. 2019; Tan, Sing, and Yeong 2020; Buchanan and Gardner 2019).”
Research status of laser additive manufacturing for metal: A review (2021, background): “However, research on metal AM is the scientific frontier filled with challenges in the AM field, because it faces numerous difficulties, such as low manufacturing efficiency and low forming accuracy [2,32,33].”
Advances in Metal Additive Manufacturing: A Review of Common Processes, Industrial Applications, and Current Challenges (2021, methodology): “The Joris Laarman Lab and Arup use a WAAM system, which is attached to a robotic arm to print stainless steel components of the Amsterdam’s bridge [9].”
Stability and design of stainless steel structures – Review and outlook (2019, methodology): “Research into material produced using directed energy deposition, specifically wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), has also been carried out [92, 93] in support of the verification of the 10.”
Current Status and Perspectives on Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) (2019, background): “Once these are ensured, those components can be used for human vertebra prototypes, hip stem implants, and treat bone fractures [168].”