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Hempcrete is one of the most amazing building materials known to man. Coupling this amazing material with emerging fabrication technology (like 3D printing), will help us to re-imagine what the material can do for us.
One of the design challenges we face here, is making the proper nozzle for the application. Hempcrete is make up of hurds, lime, water, pozzolans and sand. The hurd size will ultimately determine the nozzle diameter for the printing head which is the only setback when looking at this material.
Yes, Hempcrete has about 1/20th the compressive strength of that used in commercial construction (also partly due to the discontinuities present from the Hemp Hurds), but the material is also MUCH lighter, so that it does not have to support as much force in load-bearing applications. The printing aspect of this makes it so that we can design structures with this in mind, so that the cross sectional area of any load bearing ‘column’ can be printed with little to no waste.
I’d like to start this discussion by pushing the envelope a little. Let us harness our intellectual curiosity and create something amazing.
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Wow, that’s an amazingly novel idea!
They already have sophisticated concrete ‘boom pumps’ to deliver concrete into high-rise buildings or other ‘hard to reach’ areas with some precision, so I imagine you would just need a mechanism to control the positioning of the nozzle more precisely.
How quickly does hempcrete set? Are you able to print vertical structures?
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