World’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

Evan Garcia

GEORGETOWN, Texas (Reuters) – Like any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer builds objects by piping layer by layer – except this one is more than 45 feet (13.7 m) wide and weighs 4.75 tons for printing residences.

This summer, ICON’s robotic printers are completing the last of 100 3D-printed homes in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles outside of Austin.

ICON begins printing walls in November 2022 for what it claims is the world’s largest 3D printing community. Minimize waste of construction materials.

“It brings a lot of efficiencies to the trade market,” said Conner Jenkins, senior project manager at ICON. “So where previously there might have been five different crews building a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”

After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed together and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes the concrete mixture out like toothpaste onto a brush, building up layer after layer along a pre-programmed path to create corduroy-effect walls. .

Single-story, three- to four-bedroom homes take approximately three weeks to print and have the foundation and metal roof installed in the traditional way.

Jenkins said the concrete walls are designed to be resistant to water, mildew, termites and extreme weather.

Business development director Lawrence Nourzad, 32, and his girlfriend Angela Hontas, 29, a creative strategist, purchased a home in Wolf Ranch earlier this summer .

“It feels like a fortress,” Nourzadeh said, adding that he believed it would be able to withstand most tornadoes.

The couple said the walls also effectively insulate against the Texas heat, keeping indoor temperatures cool even when the air conditioner isn’t turned up to full blast.

However, there’s one other thing 3D-printed walls seem to prevent: a stable Wi-Fi connection.

“Obviously, these walls are very strong and thick. That provides a lot of value to us as homeowners and maintains good insulation during the Texas summer, but the signal doesn’t travel well through these walls,” Nourzad said.

To alleviate this problem, an ICON spokesperson said that most Wolf Ranch homeowners use mesh internet routers, which broadcast signals from multiple devices spread throughout the home, as opposed to traditional routers that send signals from a single device.

The 3D-printed homes at Wolf Ranch, which the developer calls the “Genesis Collection,” range in price from around $450,000 to nearly $600,000. Developers say a little more than a quarter of the 100 homes have been sold.

ICON built the first house using 3D printing technology in Austin in 2018, and hopes to one day take its technology to the moon. As part of its Artemis lunar exploration program, NASA has contracted ICON to develop a construction system that can build landing sites, shelters and other structures on the lunar surface.

(Reporting by Evan Garcia; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)