Transcript:
So I’m going to introduce Ronan Collins, the managing director of Intelibuild successful entrepreneur and a strong advocate for BIM and new technologies, applied in the construction space. Please, him a warm round of applause. Good morning, everybody. So this is an example from an architectural practice. Building information modeling BIM or basically 3d modeling for architects and engineers. This is a 3d computer model of a school project. The architect The architect has worked out their design. They have worked out the locations of the classrooms and everything else. They want to presents their design to their customers or their client. They use a 3d printer similar to the Makerbot. We have here. You can see the building being 3d printed. They print the building in layers floors, walls, components of the building. Then you can see a time lapse when they actually put all the components together. You can see there’s quite a lot of intricate details. You can actually see different classrooms. You can see the different corridors. You can get right down to fine details. They have printed the cars and the car park, which was just a touch of perfection. Which is what we expect from the architects. You can see t how the whole building is assembled. But a bit like when we were kids playing with Lego. You can take the bits apart. You can actually lift off floor by floor and you can see how the different room layers are arranged. What we’re finding is that in our industry, You can have a 3d model in BIM. But people won’t necessarily look at it. They may not walk around through it. If you actually print a 3d model like this, people can put it on the boardroom table. They can play with it. Then you start getting some useful feedback from the actual ultimate users and the teachers. This morning, I’ve got a couple of examples from one of our clients. Gammon Construction. On the table there they have lent me one of their 3d models. They actually have a 3d-printer in-house. They’ve actually invested in the 3d-printer. This is a project we’ve just completed. It’s the new Midfield Concourse at Hong Kong International Airport. It has a very complicated roof steelwork system on top. You can see from the videos from the construction site. The actual curvature of the steelwork. At the beginning of the project to get our heads around the actual geometry of the roof, how the roof is connected to the concrete structure. We actually printed a part of the building. We took the engineer’s 3d model of the actual steelwork. We used the steel 3D model in a 3d printer. I’ll show you the 3d printed model. This is an actual part of the 3d printed steel model. It’s very, very useful talking to the steel fabricator, talking to the curtain. Wall contractors talking to the guys on site to get them to start to understand the complexities of how we build these very, very tall structures and how we need to connect all the trusses and everything else. It’s very, very powerful communication technology. We took it one step further. We actually started 3d printing pipe racks. We started doing printed assemblies for major piping systems. One of the things were looking at was maintenance. Could we actually get enough space between the systems to get access valves? Get access to hangers and all the like so again, the engineer is like to valves. Get access to hangers and all the like. Again, the engineers like 3D models. They can use scale rulers to measure the models. The 3D models are accurate enough to take off dimensions. 3D printing is very, very powerful when you prototyping things. This is a one of my favorite uses. I’ve seen in the last couple weeks. This is actually Tseung Kwan O. It is a very large site and they’re having to excavate two levels of a basement. Again you can see here. The site engineers have a 3d printed model of the entire site. They have printed the retaining walls, the structural platforms and they’re using it to plan how they are going to excavate this huge hole in the ground. You have this model on the site. You can see all the different layers of steel work. You can see all the different layers of excavation And the guys are just pointing out. “this is what it is going to look Like”. The advantage of this to be able to produce a 3d model of the actual site. You first have to build a 3d CAD model. We can use the 3D CAD model to start to resolve engineering problems. By producing a physical 3D printed model, you have to figure out some of the construction difficulties. There is a process the contractors go through using BIM to actually figure out where all the temporay steel goes. They can use BIM to plan activities all the way through the construction phase. This is the new Tuen Mun Chek Lap Kok Link Gammon are building an elevated highway, which links the existing airport highway to the reclamation for the new Hong Kong Zhuhai Macau Bridge. This is all built out over the water. The 3d printed model I have with me. This morning. Is one of these precast segments for the bridge. What they do is they precast the concrete segments in China. They barge it in and they use these massive crane gantries and they stitch all the segments together. The 3d model is designed to see how the shear keys work. Look at where the steel tendons are located and pass through. Engineers can look at how the balustrades are attached and where the piping for drainage and cables are located. The 3D model for this project was used to check some of the design. This is the kind of 3D printing that you have heard about all morning. What’s of interest to me is actually. How did we physically build assets using these technologies? How do we actually 3d print a building? There are two materials that are most common, Steel and concrete. In the steel industry, we use a technology called laser sintering. Laser sintering involves injecting an iron or metal powder into a nozzle and heat it up. You use a five-axi’s turntable. The turntable is spinning and you can see they can tilt it. This is actually for an aeronautical application. This is a casing for an aeronautical component. You tilt the turntable to a specific angle, and and that will start to change the profile of the casing or pipe. You can see how to do proper additive manufacturing. You can create very large, very complicated metal components. And you can see in in six minutes. They’ve created this particular component. In the In the metal industry, this is where 3D printing is heading. Laser sintering. We can actually create real world objects which can be used in plane’s, cars and eventually in buildings. When it comes to buildings, the current research and this example, is from a research project in Loughborough University in the UK. They’ve created full-scale gantries that actually print concrete. You actually pump concrete into the nozzle. Instead of pumping plastic in you pump concrete in. They’ve done a prototype using a 3d printer. This is an old-school 3d printer which uses powder. They mix traditional concrete, a cementious blend. This is the actual rig and this is the concrete printing nozzle. It’’s a very, very large gantry and what they are doing here is printing building components. Here they are 3D printing, a façade component. You’ll see that the concrete comes out basically as paste. You can see the layers building up. It doesn’’t look very fancy, but it has huge potential. They can 3D print components. They can place in the piping for electrical systems piping for drainage systems. We can reinforce the components with steel or with fibre. We can make these things very, very substantial structurally. Then you can start to stack them up. The architects may not like it because of the aesthetic ribs that are created, but this is an indication of where the technology is going. We will get to a point where we can actually 3d print a building. Turn the lights on and sit down, Have a cup of tea and relax, but I think that’s probably 20 years away. So that’s my part on construction 3d printing. Back to you!