Embracing 3D Printers in the Building Industry
This week, Tim and Carolina talk about how 3D printers are changing the market and why people in the building industry need to embrace innovation.
More About the Show
The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.
In this episode, Tim and Carolina share some insight on how 3D printers are impacting the building materials industry, and how companies and clients should make the transition of utilizing these tools instead of avoiding them.
What’s 3D Printing?
Tim and his son bought a MakerBot, a 3D printer, about 11 years ago, and there were so many problems with it. They thought they were never going to take off, but they realized they bought the cheapest one. There were a lot of other things happening that time, but fast forward 10 or 11 years, and the topic of 3D printing in construction is getting attention.
Tim gave a presentation on 3D printing a couple of weeks ago, and he was receiving calls from clients asking if this was going to disrupt their business and should they be thinking about it for the future. The answer is yes. It might not happen tomorrow, but it is not going away.
3D printing goes back way farther than just 10 years ago when it started to become popular. At first, Carolina thought it was just rapid prototyping. But 3D printing uses different technologies. There is a diffused position model of 3D printing, which Carolina did her grad school degree on. Her graduate research was on the chemical vapor of carbon and silicon carbide fibers, and she used 3D printing for that.
Someone has finally cracked the code to figure out how to 3D create facades. There is a company called WePrintHouses, and there is another company that is getting a lot of notoriety and press called SQ4D in New York.
There are different kinds of additive manufacturing. There are filament-based, electrolysis-based, slurry-type products, powder coating type technology and even inkjet printing.
Tim was talking to Nichiha, a fiber cement company in Japan, about doing something with their mixture for a dry, extruded 3D printing. They discussed how that could even be done with their Inkjet printers as a buildup. There are various ways of putting it in the homes.
One project called Apis Corp, and they are doing commercial buildings in Europe. Those robotics come from Germany. The other project, SQ4D, is on Long Island, and many of their robotics also come from Germany, but they’re both applying the same technology, which is building up concrete in a web form, like a double-wall construction for single-family, office and commercial buildings.
There are a lot of different companies saying, “Oh, we can’t see any of our products going on these buildings. If this takes off, we’ve got to figure out what to do next.” Building product companies should be trying to figure out what to do next.
Different Types and Different Projects
The technology is still pretty young, especially in the construction industry. For the Apid Corp company, it sounds like they do layered concrete printing, which can be quite cumbersome. It’s hard to really scale that to a transportation center, like a cool train station or an airport, because the machine has to be bigger than what it is actually printing. That has to be done on-site because those large amounts of layered concrete can’t be transported or transferred.
They are basically CMU blocks that are pretty, which is great. It works for residential projects and areas like Miami and Texas where there are high hurricane zones and those high wind load resistant facades are needed. They are amazing because they’re made in place, they are custom-designed, fireproof and hurricane-proof.
There is a lot of back and forth about cement because cement takes so much embodied energy not only to produce but to haul the end product around. There’s all these sorts of embodied labor and embodied energy. However, these are buildings that could potentially last a couple hundred years versus a $700,000 home that someone could tear down in 30 years.
In certain areas, you have to install with CMU, like Miami-Dade County. When thinking about CMU, it is almost like human-enabled 3D printing. It is technically a prefab and there is scaffolding and people, or even now robots are going around placing CMU and mortar.
There are different robots a bit analogous to 3D printing, not just talking about the structural part of it. Mighty Buildings just did a big raise for their prefab construction and how they’re doing 3D printing. It’s not filament, but it is similar. It is cured with UV light as it’s printing, so it’s strengthened that way in order to make the frame of the building.
There is a company out of Germany that is 3D printing parts called Hous.Me. They’re 3D printing the parts, but they still need to be assembled on-site or in a factory before sent outside. There are all kinds of these different applications for the same technology, but there are changes depending on the segment, the manufacturer, the brand, the code of the area and different things like that.
Carolina thanks Ryan Tolle from Stocorp, who introduced her to Branch Technology, which is a new company out of Chattanooga, Tennessee — near Carolina’s old stomping grounds. They’re doing large-scale 3D printing, but they develop their own cellular level substructure. They are using it for facades.
Solid surfaces have been around a long time, especially for interiors. It does burn because it does have plastic in it, so it isn’t great for certain facade applications. People are changing the composition of these materials to make them safe for installation and exteriors and meet fire codes and wind loads.
However, Branch Technology created its own freeform polymer matrix. They extrude the fiber-reinforced polymer in a very specific way. It mimics cellular structure in the body and in nature. It could almost be called biophilic architecture because it has biomimicry designed into the building itself, which Carolina loves. It is something Branch Technology has developed in-house, and they call it C-FAB.
That is the base, and then you can fill and/or mill composites that then strengthen the cellular microstructure. Then, you have a finished facade panel that can take on literally any shape. They call it Branch Clad. It’s their own glass fiber reinforced concrete.
Speaking back to Tim’s conversation with Nichiha, that’s what cure stone is. It is glass fiber reinforced concrete, GFRC. That is something that Nichiha Japan could get into because they’ve already got the raw material and the manufacturing way of putting that together into funky shapes, like pure stone.
That’s what Branch Technology does with their facade process. Then, they use connections and hardware to either create a rainscreen system or attach to an existing structure and/or create the actual facade itself for a building.
Branch talks a lot about the democratization of design on their site. By bringing everyone together, the GC, the installer, the designer, the architect and the manufacturer, in the design process, you can get the aesthetic you want, meet the project budget and address the user needs, too. You are also meeting the building codes, so you’re making the inspectors happy as well. Democratization of design is super relevant today, and these types of companies are disrupting the industry.
Carolina and Tim have both received calls and concerns from clients asking about this, and it is not going away. People need to take a look at 3D printing and 3D printing in construction because it seems to be the future.
Ask Questions and Do Research
Both Tim and Carolina have 3D printers at home. For Tim and his family, it’s been more for fun and more of a toy. But for companies like Nichiha and others, a lot of smart companies have used 3D printing, additive manufacturing for rapid prototyping because it makes things a lot easier to figure out if things are going to work from a design standpoint.
Tim and Carolina agree that the word disruption is overused. From the way Tim looks at it, it’s just innovation. It’s the evolution of technologies from the engineering discipline and then using them to further where we are. This is also a very sustainable way of constructing because fewer materials are used. Little to no concrete is being used, and it is something that can last for hundreds of years.
Tim has an event coming up in April and one of the panels is about consolidation in the building materials industry. When Tim thinks of displacement in the building materials space, he thinks of traditional wall assemblies and traditional construction. The labor problem probably isn’t going away in terms of a shortage. How can people consolidate assemblies and consolidate the embodied labor and make it more efficient with less waste?
Mark Mitchell talks about waste inefficiency all the time, but it’s a real problem. Some of these are being displaced, offset or replaced with another product or assembly.
Tim remembered when he was on a project, and the GC was saying, “Oh my gosh, just in this cladding system, I have seven vendors.” How can you consolidate that? Branch Technologies could be a solution for that or even Nichiha,
How can they get down to two or three vendors? Can they get down to one vendor for a facade that’s all-inclusive? Can they get down to one vendor or one system and assembly for a wall? Imagine if the 3D printing of a home gets to be more accepted and looks more finished even over time, what left out? The siding, the drywall, certain types of installation, certain types of electrical and plumbing parts and particular roofing are left out.
As a building products company, start thinking, “What if my products could be displaced? How could that be part of this story?” There will be blockbuster people in this Netflix space, in the building materials industry. That’s a great case study for what is being experienced right now.
The good thing is people are paying attention. They’re asking the question; they’re trying to look ahead. Tim’s advice is: Don’t just look at this ball. Think about how the fastball sets up the changeup in baseball a lot of times. This is a fastball. What’s the changeup? What’s the next thing to be considered for the innovation people?
It is a very good question that cannot be answered right away. It’s something for people to think about for days and months to come, but always be asking that question. Ask, “What is that changeup? What is coming? What’s coming after this?” One of the ways to find answers is to network with people, get involved and find out. There are a lot of unanswered things such as waterproofing and interacting with roofing for these facades and pricing.
Take a look at the cost here too, because yes, there’s democratizing design and combining user needs, business goals, technological constraints, speed of installed development and aesthetics. But, is the budget being met? Are people excluding certain projects from using this technology?
Those are the kinds of questions that people need to ask themselves and figure out what their next product needs to be, where they need to be developing, how can they expand what they already have, how they can best use what they already have in-house and what their clients are going to want in the future. They might not know, so they have to be told.
A lot of building products companies think that their distributor dealers are their customers, and they couldn’t be more wrong. The customer for building product manufacturers is the end-user. Doing consumer and end-user research is very important because they may not accept some of these technologies or they may, but you won’t know until you either do that research in-house or employ someone to do that research.
Reach Out to Others for Help
Figure out the connection or the disconnection, and either write it off or figure out how to be part of it. What it looks like to Tim and Carolina is that somehow, these technologies, and iterations thereof, are going to be part of this solution.
Think of all the money out there, the private equity money, the venture capital money. There are not a lot of places for these investors to put money right now. They are desperate to put money into new technologies. As seen in the startup world too, a lot of them return in the first 10 years. Isn’t that important? That money just keeps coming in because there’s not a lot of great safe spaces for money. There may be some home runs here.
Maybe someone’s R&D budget is only 1% or 2% of the revenue or whatever the ratio is. Those people should start thinking like a startup company. If they can’t become a startup company in their thinking, then maybe they should align themselves with startups so that they can learn from them and help support them and understand the money and investment that’s coming in. If that’s going to be a catalyst, they will be right there while it’s happening.
People can hire consultants if they don’t have the engineering in-house or the data research. A company like John Burns, for example, or a company like Pivot, where people find an engineer or somebody who has the knowledge of the market, has the knowledge of what the building code requires and is innovative, can help that person develop.
At Nichiha, Carolina mentions how they developed the ultimate clip and it wasn’t expensive. It was just tiny changes that they made to that clip based on what they knew about performance, based on what they knew from test results, based on what they knew the market needed. It made installation easier. It allowed Nietzsche to earn a lot more money because they were able to put more panels on more buildings and on higher structures because of that little tiny clip tweak iteration.
There’s always something people can do, even at a small scale, if they don’t have the budget to develop something huge. Reach out to people. Reach out to Carolina. Reach out to Tim. So many companies can help people stay ahead. It’s not just for the startups
Maybe team up with someone else in the industry or some complementary product to your product and say, “Hey, let’s team up and pool resources to see if we can do some research on these things together.”
Tim was thinking of ancillary technologies, like the LIDAR or laser scanners for cladding and modeling. All these things have to be modeled. Look at the different code and where code has been adopted. Also, look at where the most traditional building product shortage is happening. That’s where the most pain is. If these companies can alleviate the building product and labor shortage, then it’s going to make a lot more sense in certain areas than it will in others.
There are different ways to look at it. Look at the constraints, look at the opportunities and then find out where those are geographically and start working the problem there.
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Show Notes:
Mentioned Companies & Projects