In the Queue

In China, a five-story apartment building was built piece by piece with a 3-D printer. So was a nearly 12,000-square-foot villa.

In Springfield, 3-D printers are more often used by manufacturers to produce products such as hearing aids or durable assembly parts. But that’s beginning to change said Troy Beck, director of business development for D3 Technologies, a design consultancy that sells the printers.

“The uses and applications for 3-D printers just continue to grow,” Beck said. “I know there are architectural firms that use them for 3-D models.”

The future of 3-D printing has far-reaching implications for engineering and design professionals.

Tomorrow’s designers
David Beach, assistant professor of architecture at Drury University, said the school currently has three 3-D printers, noting the educators try to stay ahead of the market trends.

“We tend to adopt technology faster than architecture firms do,” Beach said, adding students often enjoy using the tools.

Its two go-to machines are 12-by-6-by-9 inches – a nice size for producing architectural models, but he said few firms have endured the expense, which often runs in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Beach said he understands Bates & Associates Inc. in Springfield and Kansas City-based Hufft Projects both use the printers. Company representatives did not respond by press time.  

According to industry news leader 3DPrinting.com, 3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The additive process creates objects by laying down successive layers of material until its form takes shape.

Beach said students use the printers to produce more experimental and complex designs – structures with a lot of curves and holes, for example, or for simple pieces that are part of larger structures.

It’s technically called Fused Deposition Modeling and is used for 3-D prototyping with Drury’s printers. FDM technology was used on a larger scale to produce the apartment building in China, Beach said.

“A filament stacks up layer after layer. It’s kind of like (two-dimensional) printing, just over and over again,” he said. “FDM printing is really important because it’s going to translate directly into the first wave of larger-scale commercial products.”

China-based construction research and development company WinSun is responsible for the sprawling villa and apartments. The process is the same – just the scale is different, according to Beach.

“It uses a concrete product – not your standard concrete – but it is the same process as FDM extrusion. It prints layer on top of layer,” he said.

According to WinSun’s English website, YHBM.com, the custom 3-D printer it developed is 20-by-33-by-132 feet. It can build houses in less than 24 hours.

“It is printing off sections of buildings, then shipping them to the site and erecting them,” Beach said. “It’s similar to a premanufactured process, but it’s different in that it is not constrained to one simple panel system over and over again.

The complexity of form it prints is irrelevant to cost. The costs come from materials.”

WinSun claims labor costs can be reduced by 50 to 80 percent with such a large-scale printer, and material expenses could drop by 30 to 60 percent. Production times also can be slashed in half or up to 70 percent. However, potential savings could be offset by high-end FDM-capable printer costs.

Form and function
Closer to home, D3 Technologies in Springfield sells 3-D printers from 3D Systems in Rock Hill, S.C. Prices can range from $1,000 to $1 million, but Beck said most commercial printers range from $50,000 to $100,000. D3 Technologies, he said, sells about two 3-D printers per month.

“Virtually every color that you would have on your home-type color printer, it can print that,” he said, of the color-printer model with an ink-jet cartridge.

Others, such as plastic printers, typically create products in solid colors, such as opaque or black.

“Primarily, we serve manufacturers,” he said, declining to disclose customer names. “If you have a manufactured part, and you’ve designed it three dimensionally, you can print it and see how it fits into an assembly. … Before they go into full production, they might want to make sure tolerances are there.”

He said one D3 Technologies’ customer in St. Louis prints plastic parts it puts into production.

“So, there are very practical uses. They’re not just for pretty models,” he said.

In all, Beck said the company sells six types of 3-D printers using a range of technologies including direct-metal printers.

“They’ve really opened the door from producing a pretty part on a desk to full production parts,” he said, adding 3D Systems has a tire manufacturer customer that prints molds for tires. “That would have surprised me a few years ago. The future is a little unknown.”

That potential hasn’t been harnessed in the local architectural industry.

Butler, Rosenbury & Partners Inc. President Geoffery Butler said costs simply are too prohibitive now. He said he received a demonstration a few years ago, and was impressed to see it produce a belt buckle.

“It was way cool, but it was $25,000 and the biggest thing it could do was 10-by-10-by-10 inches,” he said.

Butler believes the printer could have been an effective tool for modeling, but it wasn’t worth the price. A few decades ago, he said it was common practice to build models for clients, but labor intensive, so the models slowly faded away.

“We would have had an intern architect take our plans and spend three or four weeks building a model,” he said.

That practice could make a comeback if 3-D printer prices fall, but current alternatives work fine, he said.

“We can take the model and on the computer screen show them – ‘If you’re standing over here, here’s what that looks like,’” Butler said. “If there was a company that would buy a piece of equipment like that and make it available for a broader group of people to use, that would drive the cost down. But if you had to buy a $50,000 piece of equipment, and you’re the only one using it, I think that’s pretty doggone expensive.”