Infrastructure planning

A particularly interesting project we were glad to take part in: developing a new process for constructing buildings and positioning their services.

Building a house or a block involves a great many elements and trades, and the hardest part is getting perfect synchronisation between all of them into one finished thing.

In this case we printed the structure including its water, electrical and ventilation services. Each service is marked in a different colour, which gives every trade a very clear visual reference and acts as a three-dimensional map of the building.

The trades responded very positively and a good many problems on site were avoided. What made this possible is a technology called CJP – printing in coloured gypsum. The structure comes out of the printer already coloured, and all that is left is a little cleaning and a coat of lacquer to preserve the colours.

The technology that made it possible

The project was printed in CJP – coloured gypsum powder printing. It is one of the few technologies that prints full colour into the material itself, rather than painting after the fact. The structure leaves the printer with every service already in its own colour, and what remains is cleaning and lacquering to preserve them.

Why this solves a real problem

The difficulty in construction is not any one trade on its own, it is the coordination between them. A two-dimensional drawing makes each of them build the three-dimensional model in their own head, and that is where the clashes between pipework, electrics and ventilation are born. A coloured physical model removes the imagining altogether: everyone looks at the same object and sees the same clash before it happens on site.

For full colour in plastic, see also PolyJet printing.

A similar project of your own?

Send us a file or a description of the problem and you will get a recommendation on technology, material and timescale – talk to an engineer. See also product design and development and 3D printing production.