The Navy and NSF want to use 3D printers to construct buildings
Concrete printers would be able to build a 2,500-square-foot building within a single day.
For the military, that means soldiers deploying to a remote location with little or no infrastructure could be operating out of permanent structures pretty soon after a combat engineer unit arrived with printers and material aboard a C-17.
Essentially, building via printer would work just like any computer assisted manufacturing program. But instead of a robotic tap and die machine turning out parts according to a program, it would be an oversized printer following programmed schematics to lay down, layer by layer, a building, including outside and interior walls, spaces for doors and windows and all electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning conduits.
The machines working now are capable of printing out high strength concrete walls able to bear a compressive stress of 10,000 psi (conventional concrete has a psi of 7,000 or less).
Khoshnevis says 3D construction is likely the solution to be “one of the very few feasible approaches for building structures on the Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the new century.”
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/01/21/navy-helps-fund-3d-printing-buildings/
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