The US military is increasingly experimenting with new technologies. 3D printing, in particular, offers many opportunities for the organisation. For instance, it recently deployed the world's largest 3D printer to make a barracks of about 46 square metres.
A few months ago, the printer was made operational at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in the state of Illinois. The Additive Manufacturing Team of the Marine Corps Systems Command worked with Marines from the Marine Expeditionary Force to build a barracks of over 40 square metres using the 3D concrete printer. This was done within a time frame of forty hours.
"This exercise has not been done before," said Matthew Friedell, one of the project leaders in a press release. "People have already printed buildings and large structures, but it hasn't been done onsite and all at once before. The printer here has been running sequentially."
Can be even faster
The team started with a computer-assisted design model on a 10-year-old computer. As soon as they pressed 'print', the concrete was pushed through the printer head and repeatedly layered to build the walls. It still took about 40 hours now because marines had to monitor the process and also refill the printer with concrete. If this was done by a robot, Friedell says the barracks could easily be made in one day. "We talked about it earlierl: a robot would have to do everything that is boring, dangerous and dirty work, and a construction site near a battlefield is all of that. It would be nice progress if we could build shelters without putting a lot of marines in danger. You don't want them walking around with hammers and plywood."
If 3D printing could eventually be implemented in the navy, for example, houses, schools and other buildings could also be quickly printed in areas affected by a (natural) disaster. Especially since concrete is often more readily available than, say, wood.
Army's AD team is at least going to continue researching 3D printing. In any case, they want to expose more marines to it so that it can be determined what requirements are still needed for future technologies and autonomous sysgtems. "Our future working environments will be very kinetic and dangerous because we don't always know so much where we are going in. The idea that in the future we can take Marines out of there and put robots in their place helps us in our missions."
Source: Marines.mil
Photo: Courtesy photo
