INTERLOCK(JOINT) DESIGN AND ASSEMBLY FOR 3D CONCRETE PRINTED COMPONENT

Abstract

With the recent rapid research and development of three-dimensional (3D) printing technology, it has been well applied in various industries including the construction industry. Especially, in the past few years, the application of 3D concrete (3DC) printing technology has evolved drastically. Based on the adoption of different printing approaches, the construction can be carried out on-site or off-site. And depending on the scale of the print element and the machinery used, the structure will be printed as one entity or separated elements like modular components. In the building industry, most of the projects consist of huge structure designs and some of them cannot be printed as an integrated structure due to the printer restraints. As such, those projects can proceed printing by dividing the structure into printable size and using joints to connect the individual modules. The joints used for connection are critical in achieving structural integrity. In this paper, an innovative joint design was proposed for the 3DC printed elements. To carry out the design of the joint, experiments and observations had been carried out in this study to collect sufficient data and information as the reference for the novel joint design. At the end of the paper, a joint was proposed for connecting the 3DC printed components which belong to the Construction 3D Printing for Urban Farming Community project.