Mix Design and Printability of Concrete for 3-D Printing

Abstract

Every industry in the world is moving towards automation, making things more mechanized and self-driven. Automation has been accepted successfully across every sector due to high accuracy, precision and cost and time efficiency. Concrete industry despite being one of the major industries in the world is still striving in the field of automation, as this term is relatively new in concrete technology. 3-D concrete printing is full automation of the construction practice and has the ability to transform the process completely and making it error free. A lot of researchers and companies are working on this topic extensively for a broader parametric study of the process and to achieve better precision that this process is capable of providing. In this study, various parameters related to the 3-D printed concrete were discussed which indicates the printability of concrete. For this purpose, a setup was developed similar to a printer, which extruded concrete to a printing bed. A mix design was designed to be tested on this setup with varying w/c ratio and SP dosage and samples were printed. Then different parameters were analyzed and compared by changing the mix design composition to improve the printability of the concrete.