About
The research group has roots that go back nearly 20 years, when Additive Manufacturing was just beginning to establish itself as a natural extension two Rapid Prototyping within the product design, manufacturing and automotive sectors.
The School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, and the Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering began a long-standing collaboration to bridge the gaps between manufacturing know-how and construction sector.
This led to the original £1.2m, ‘Free-form Construction’ project (2006-2011) that was funded through the EPSRC’s Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre initiative at Loughborough.
At the time, the University of Southern California under the leadership of Berokh Khoshnevis was developing ‘Contour Crafting’ a way of printing the walls of building in-situ, and an entrepreneur in Italy, Enrico Dini was developing a particle bed 3D printer that could produce large freeform parts.
The project at Loughborough focussed on inventing a method that extruded filaments of cement-based mortar for the additive manufacture of complex components in a factory setting. The process was called concrete printing, which has now become a ubiquitous term for the technology worldwide.
The same project produced The Bench, the world’s first reinforced, concrete printed component, and The Panels, the first double-curved panels printed with conformal voids, and delivered the seminal academic papers on 3DCP materials both in the fresh and hardened state.
17 years on from the start of that first project and the group is growing in-line with the huge global interest in the technology. Currently we number 17 academics, researcher’s and PhD students across four schools at Loughborough, work with universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester here in the UK, and collaborate with globally leading institutions on research. We have strong collaborations with industry through our research and have help found a start-up company to deliver technology and services commercially: Concrenetics.
Recently, we have taken 3D Concrete Printing to the next level hybrid process, which includes milling to improve the precision of the surface and geometry, and our group is expanding its portfolio of automation applications and technologies, beyond 3DCP.