By Evan Garcia
GEORGETOWN, Texas (Reuters) – Like any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer builds an object layer by layer – with the difference that this printer is over 13.7 meters wide, weighs 4.75 tons and prints residential buildings.
This summer, ICON’s robotic printer will complete the last of 100 3D-printed homes in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin.
ICON began printing the walls of what it claims is the world’s largest 3D-printed community in November 2022. Compared to traditional construction, 3D printing homes is faster, more cost-effective, requires fewer workers and reduces construction material waste, the company says.
“It brings a lot of efficiency to the commercial market,” said Conner Jenkins, senior project manager at ICON. “Where previously there might have been five different teams coming to build a wall system, now we have one team and one robot.”
After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes the concrete mix like toothpaste onto a brush and builds it layer by layer along a pre-programmed path, creating corduroy-look walls.
Printing of the single-story, three- to four-bedroom homes will take about three weeks, with the foundation and metal roofs being installed in a traditional manner.
Jenkins said the concrete walls are designed to be resistant to water, mold, termites and extreme weather conditions.
Lawrence Nourzad, a 32-year-old business development director, and his girlfriend Angela Hontas, a 29-year-old creative strategist, bought a home on Wolf Ranch earlier this summer.
“It feels like a fortress,” Nourzad said, adding that he was confident it would withstand most tornadoes.
The walls also provided good insulation against the Texas heat, the couple said, keeping the interior temperature cool even when the air conditioning wasn’t running at full power.
However, there was something else the 3D-printed walls seemed to protect against: a stable wireless internet connection.
“Obviously, these are really strong, thick walls. That’s very valuable to us as homeowners and makes sure the thing is really well insulated in a Texas summer, but the signal doesn’t travel very well through those walls,” Nourzad said.
To alleviate this problem, most homeowners at Wolf Ranch used mesh internet routers, which broadcast a signal from multiple units spread throughout the home, according to an ICON spokeswoman. Traditional routers, on the other hand, broadcast the signal from only one device.
The 3D-printed homes at Wolf Ranch, which developers call the “Genesis Collection,” cost between $450,000 and nearly $600,000. Developers said just over a quarter of the 100 homes have been sold.
ICON, which 3D printed its first home in Austin in 2018, hopes to one day take its technology to the moon. NASA has commissioned ICON as part of its Artemis lunar exploration program to develop a construction system that can build landing pads, shelters and other structures on the lunar surface.
(Reporting by Evan Garcia, editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
