ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING OF CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS
The course the LU is based is situated on the premise that the construction sector has a crucial impact on energy consumption and carbon emissions. Despite this, there is not enough sign of any effort being made to reduce the use of regular concrete or to change classic building methods. Concrete is blamed for a variety of environmental problems. As of yet in the foreseeable future there is no viable alternative to concrete to meet our society’s needs and mitigate the ongoing climate changes. The construction industry needs to benefit from an increased level of technology in order to reduce its carbon footprint. Additive manufacturing is an architectural, economic and environmental revolution for the construction industry. Today, 3D printers allow the automated creation of concrete structures with complex shapes. This learning unit brings a disruptive approach, exploring material theology, design and design management and student projects investigating the way buildings are designed and built.
Learning Community Activities
- Coming up
- coming soon
- Past activities
How to get involved?
(Students and educators)
Contact the EUTOPIA curriculum team: Jo Angouri (J.Angouri@warwick.ac.uk) and Karen Triquet (karen.triquet@vub.be).
Learning Community Members
- Lead: Alexandre Pierre (CY). Email: alexandre.pierre@cyu.fr
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Alexandre PIERRE joined the Department of Civil Engineering and the laboratory of mechanics and civil engineering at CY Cergy Paris University as an Associate Professor in September 2014.
Alexandre PIERRE’s research interests are in the area of construction materials, in particular rheology and processing using additive manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing.
Recent efforts include investigating selective binding techniques and the integration of bio-based materials. - Partner: Tine Tysmans (VUB). Email: Tine.Tysmans@vub.be
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Tine Tysmans is an associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, dept. Mechanics of Materials and Constructions. She graduated as Civil Engineer in 2006 and received her PhD degree - as a PhD-Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders - in 2010 on the topic of thin shell structures in textile reinforced cement composites. Tine Tysmans is teaching courses within the field of Structural analysis, Structural design, Mechanics, and Lightweight cement composite structures.
Her research is on resource-efficient lightweight structures such as shells, scissor structures or sandwich panels, often using cement composites. She studies their mechanical performance by means of experimental testing, numerical modelling, form finding and structural optimisation.
In the past she was a visiting researcher at Princeton University (USA) and ENISE Saint-Etienne (France). She is an active member of two RILEM technical committees (MCC-Mechanical characterization and structural design of textile reinforced concrete and IMC-Durability of inorganic matrix composites used for strengthening of masonry constructions). She was and is involved in several international joint PhDs with University of Patras (Greece), Jimma University (Ethiopia) and CY Cergy Paris Université (France), the latter within the Eutopia framework.