The method employs a set of coordinated vertically climbing robots that carry a special Contour Crafting nozzle assembly and motion control system and a special method of cementitious material delivery system. The proposed approach, showed on this page by an animation, is based on using concrete and automatically constructing towers by means of: a) robotic system that can climb the tower as it is being constructed by a novel construction module, b) the construction module based on Contour Crafting (a large-scale 3D Printing system), and c) a novel material delivery system.
It has been pointed out as a pioneer of a new era in the construction field due to the benefits that it can bring to the environment and to the construction process itself. The robotic system keeps the construction module that it carries well aligned in such a way that the final tower ends up having near-perfect geometry and orientation with respect to the horizon. However, the current method of tower construction is limited because it is expensive to build cranes that can reach higher than the current maximum height (85 to 100 meters). Invented by the speaker, Contour Crafting is a mega-scale 3D fabrication process aiming at automated on-site construction of whole structures as well as subcomponents. Many types of infrastructure elements may be automatically built with variations of the CC technology. Using a quick-setting, concrete-like material, contour crafting forms the house's walls layer by layer until topped off by floors and ceilings set in place by the crane. They are often classified as wide load which require special transportation considerations.
Contour Crafting - Free download as Powerpoint Presentation (.ppt / .pptx), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or view presentation slides online. Given the current method of tower construction, the tower is the most expensive part of the entire wind turbine assembly which includes the foundation, the tower (about $500K), the nacelle Generator), the yaw and the rotor (blades, the hub and the nose cone).The large steel sections of the tower have to be transported from the factory to the wind farm for installation. Rapid advances in this The Contour Crafting approach. Also taller towers require large base segments that will be hard to transport (width limitation of available roads, height limits imposed by overpasses, etc.) Contour Crafting Technology can change the Civil Engineering field, and how it is capable of changing our notion about construction process. Contour crafting (CC) is a 3D printing method developed for constructing big elements, it is based on printing the building layer by layer using special material ejection. This fabrication technique is capable of utilizing various types of materials to produce parts with high surface quality at high fabrication speed.