Hardened properties of high-performance printing concrete

By T. Le, Simon Austin, Sungwoo Lim, Richard A. Buswell, R. Law, A. Gibb, T. Thorpe. 2012

893 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper presents the hardened properties of a high-performance fibre-reinforced fine-aggregate concrete extruded through a 9 mm diameter nozzle to build layer-by-layer structural components in a printing process. The printing process is a digitally controlled additive method capable of manufacturing architectural and structural components without formwork, unlike conventional concrete construction methods. The effects of the layering process on density, compressive strength, flexural strength, tensile bond strength and drying shrinkage are presented together with the implication for mix proportions. A control concrete (mould-cast specimens) had a density of approximately 2250 kg/m3, high strength (107 MPa in compression, 11 MPa in flexure) and 3 MPa in direct tension, together with a relatively low drying shrinkage of 175 μm (cured in water) and 855 μm (cured in a chamber at 20 °C and 60% relative humidity) at 184 days. In contrast well printed concrete had a density of 2350 kg/m3, compressive strength of 75–102 MPa, flexural strength of 6–17 MPa depending on testing direction, and tensile bond strength between layers varying from 2.3 to 0.7 MPa, reducing as the printing time gap between layers increased. The well printed concrete had significantly fewer voids greater than 0.2 mm diameter (1.0%) when compared with the mould-cast control (3.8%), whilst samples of poorly printed material had more voids (4.8%) mainly formed in the interstices between filaments. The additive extrusion process was thus shown to retain the intrinsic high performance of the material.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59385dc12dfa3ba31fa553f0a52733a2415823bf

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In Civil and Structural Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Design of a 3D printed concrete bridge by testing (2018, background): “…to the tensile capacity of the printed concrete with all its interfaces, which has been shown by several researchers to depend on the interface interval time and may be less than the bulk material tensile strength (Le et al., 2012, Zareiyan & Khoshnevis 2017, Panda et al. 2018), becomes irrelevant.”
Early age mechanical behaviour of 3D printed concrete: Numerical modelling and experimental testing (2018, background): “Le et al. [11] discuss a reduction in bond strength between layers as the printing time gap increases, whereas Duballet et al. [12] report a toolpath dependent failure mode in printed specimens.”
Effect of printing parameters on interlayer bond strength of 3D printed limestone-calcined clay-based cementitious materials: An experimental and numerical study (2020, background): “The uniaxial tensile strength decreased with increasing time gap, which agreed well with the earlier studies [4,9,32].”
Hardened properties of 3D printed concrete: The influence of process parameters on interlayer adhesion (2019, methodology): “This is in line with other research [16,17].”
Method of enhancing interlayer bond strength in construction scale 3D printing with mortar by effective bond area amplification (2019, methodology): “, [29] used a flatbed scanner to analyze the inter-filament voids distribution in 3D printed mortar specimens.”
Additive manufacturing of concrete in construction: potentials and challenges of 3D concrete printing (2016, methodology): “However, as, reported by Le et al. (2011), circular filament with insufficient flow can cause air cavities in between filaments next to each other.”