Contour Crafting

Syndicate replies to “Contour Crafting” topic Sat, 08/30/2008 - 17:23 — admiral doty

Contour crafting uses rapid prototyping technology scaled up to build housing. It could be used to build a seastead out of fiber reinforced concrete on a submersible platform in a deep harbor. The submerged floats are pumped out to float the structure off of the platform after the build is complete, with the platform and contour crafter ready to reuse to build another seastead.

http://www.isi.edu/craft/Description.html

‹ Multi-family seastead design Low Cost Seastead ›

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Sun, 08/31/2008 - 15:08 — Carl Pålsson

Very interesting. It´s sort

Very interesting. It´s sort of like a giant 3D printer with concrete. You should be able to build more complex shapes quite easily with this, to optimize the design for good sea behavior, wave resistance and general strength (i.e more efficient than just a plain cylinder).

I wonder whether fiber concrete is enough though, with the rather large tensile forces i guess most seasteads will be subject to. Perhaps it is possible to combine this with conventional reinforcement.

Here is a flash bit that explains the concept visually: http://www.contourcrafting.org/

Mon, 09/01/2008 - 06:43 — admiral doty

examples of contour craftable shapes

Here are a couple of examples of what can easily be done with contour crafting. The trick is to not use concrete for tensile and bending moment loads, only compressive loads. Tensile loads are better suited for cables, rods, or pipe. This is an advantage of the semi-submersible structure, on top of the greater stability shown in Vince Cate's experiments. It can be built as an arched structure of hyperbolic cones on top of the submerged floats. Tension rods or cables can hold the arched cones together at their bottoms and at their apexes to prevent lateral motion.

http://www.geocities.com/flyingconcrete/index.htm
http://www.rogerdean.com/architecture/index.htm