COBOD, a company that specializes in 3D printing buildings, printed a concrete two-story building in India made by L&T Construction, a first for the AM industry. COBOD’s expertise as a construction specialist is evidenced by its partnership with GE Additive, through which it is 3D printing bases for 200-meter-tall wind turbines. The company also printed 3.5 houses in four days. Its efforts averaged eight square meters an hour on this occasion.
L&T Construction is the construction arm of the twenty-one-billion-dollar technology, engineering & construction conglomerate Larsen & Toubro. It is India’s largest construction company and ranked among the world’s top thirty contractors. L&T Construction has recently 3D printed India’s first two-story building (G+1) of sixty-five square meters using a concrete mix developed by their in-house team. This mix is based on locally available raw materials and methods for integrating reinforcement with the 3D printed concrete in an open-to-sky environment.
COBOD’s 3D printing system successfully completed the building using this mix. The new building is located close to Chennai and is the second building L&T has made with COBOD’s printer, the first being a one-floor twenty-two-square-meter building with a bedroom, hall and kitchen.
Henrik Lund-Nielsen, the founder and general manager of COBOD, said that:
L&T Construction’s project marks a huge step forward for our industry, on a global scale. Not only is the project showing that more and more conventional construction companies are adopting 3D printing, but the 3D printing of a real concrete made by L&T themselves is significant, as this helps to drive down the cost even further. It is really impressive how L&T developed the 3D printable concrete and applied integral horizontal and vertical reinforcement in the building.
