OPTIMIZATION OF CLAY MOULD FOR CONCRETE CASTING USING DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

OPTIMIZATION OF CLAY MOULD FOR CONCRETE CASTING USING DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS SIHAN WANG 1 , ZACK XUEREB CONTI 2 and FELIX RASPALL 3 1,2,3 Singapore University of Technology and Design 1,2 {sihan_wang|xuereb_zack}@mymail.sutd.edu.sg 3 [email protected] Abstract. This paper presents a research work to optimize the Additive Manufactured (AM) clay moulds for concrete casting utilizing the Design of Experiments (DOE). The objective of this approach is to understand the impacts of clay moulds’ fabrication parameters on the displacement of cast concrete artefacts. This will contribute to efficient and economical clay mould production without losing accuracy. We adopt a DOE approach to reveal insights into the influence of critical fabrication parameters on the displacement of the final concrete artefact and thus, suggest critical parameter settings to ensure that the lateral pressure exerted by concrete in the vertical build-up is sustained. We demonstrate experimental results for a case study: vertical columns of circular cross-sections. Keywords. Clay Mould; Additive Manufacturing; Robotic Fabrication; Design of Experiments. 1. Introduction In the past two decades, the use of cementitious materials in Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies has grown substantially within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC). These AM techniques, including Contour Crafting - concrete extrusion AM (Khoshnevis, 2004) and D-shape project - concrete binderjetting AM (Cesaretti, et al., 2014) present advanced options to concrete construction leading to high production rate, more geometry freedom and cost reduction (Perrot et al., 2016). In this paper we adopt a clay robotic approach for concrete casting (Figure 1), where the AM extrusion of a clay is used as a mould for concrete to be poured into (Wang et al., 2017). Once the concrete cures, the clay is demoulded and can be recycled for subsequent prints. Thus, this method takes the advantage of AM to enable the production of freeform geometries without depending on extensive one-off formworks. The use of clay as a mould, further sidesteps such problems of additive manufacturing as the printed material’s performance is not equivalent to that of the final product. However, there remain unsolved issues which need to be addressed in this fabrication method. The drying process, enhances its tensile strength and stiffness (Barnes, 2018; Tollenaar et al., 2017; Trabelsi et al., 2012), which in turn enables the clay mould to withstand material mass in large scale casting. However, as a Intelligent & Informed, Proceedings of the 24 th International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) 2019, Volume 2, 283-292. © 2019 and published by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.

OPTIMIZATION OF CLAY MOULD FOR CONCRETE CASTING USING DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

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clay mould

additive manufacturing

robotic fabrication

design of experiments