Contour Crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California. Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.
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Figure - 1
The key feature of CC is to use double trowels acting as 2 solid planar surfaces to create a smooth and accurate fabrication. As shown in figure - 1 , the extrusion nozzle has a top and a side trowel. As the material is pushed out, the traversal of the trowels creates smooth outer and top surfaces on the layer. The side trowel can be deflected to create non-orthogonal surfaces. The extrusion process builds only the outside edges of each layer of the object. After complete extrusion of each closed section of a given layer, if needed filler material such as concrete can be poured to fill the area defined by the extruded edges.
Application of CC at job site is shown as figure - 2.Nozzle is carried by a two parallel lanes which nozzle can move on on a gantry machine.This process allows architects to design structures with functional and exotic architectural geometries that are not easy to realize by current manual construction approach. Also, multiple materials that chemically react with one another may be fed through the CC nozzle system and mixed in the nozzle barrel immediately before deposition.
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Figure - 3
CC is mostly controlled by computer, accurate amounts of selected construction materials may be deposited precisely in the required locations. In this way, elements such as strain sensors, floor and wall heaters can be built into the structure in an integrated. Robot control steel-mesh reinforcement may be devised too, as shown in Figure - 3.
Here are some picture of CC lab made material. really cool technology.
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CC can do more than concrete and reinforcement job. I will keep digging for more information on automatic tiling of floors and walls, plumbing system, electrical system by CC technology.
