3D Printing Concrete on temporary surfaces: The design and fabrication of a concrete shell structure

One of the geometrical restrictions associated with printed paste materials such as concrete, is that material must be self-supporting during printing. In this research paper a new methodology for 3D Printing Concrete onto a temporary freeform surface is presented. This is achieved by setting up a workflow for combining a Flexible Mould developed at TU Delft with a 4-degrees-of-freedom gantry printer (4 DOF) provided at TU Eindhoven. A number of hypothetical cases are studied, namely fully-printing geometries or combining 3D printing with casting concrete. The final outcome is a 5 m² partially-printed and partially-cast shell structure, combined with a CNC-milled mould simulating a Flexible Mould.