Abstract
Due to concrete’s traditional role as a casting material its appearance as a uniform solid mass is one of the material’s most distinct traits. When poured in a mould fresh concrete adheres to the shape of the formwork and material distribution is not adaptable at a more detailed level. This paper explores how deposition-based additive manufacturing opens up new opportunities for controlling the distribution of concrete at a previously neglected intermediate scale - the meso-scale. By adopting principles of knitting to toolpath planning, the paper presents a computational method for varying the density, porosity, and surface articulation of the material, previously inconceivable due to the limitations of formwork.
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Acknowledgements
The work presented in this article was partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642877.
The authors would like to thank XtreeE for their generous support and expertise in the production of full-scale prototypes. The authors also thank colleagues at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden who provided insight that greatly assisted the research.
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Westerlind, H., Hernández, J. (2020). Knitting Concrete. In: Bos, F., Lucas, S., Wolfs, R., Salet, T. (eds) Second RILEM International Conference on Concrete and Digital Fabrication. DC 2020. RILEM Bookseries, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49916-7_96
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49916-7_96
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