DEPLOYABLE FREEFORM CONSTRUCTION STRUCTURES

Rupert Soar

Loughborough University

THE PROBLEM WITH LARGE SCALE CONSTRUCTION

Though Freeform Construction’s roots lie within the field of Rapid Manufacturing, the applications, processes, materials and design constraints it will encounter will be unique to the construction industry.   This means that simply scaling up existing Rapid Manufacturing processes will not work on construction scales.  Existing Rapid Manufacturing machines operate in very controlled environments and, in most cases, could not be further from the environment found on the construction site.  There are good examples of what a scaled Rapid Manufacturing machine would look like.  Go to any shipyard, and you will see massive gantry crane systems manoeuvring components around the site.  With higher levels of control and a suitable deposition head mounted on the jib, then something akin to scaled Rapid Manufacturing emerges.  There are already excellent examples of very large scale ‘layer manufacturing’ systems such as Shimizu Corporation’s SMART system, Taisei Corporation’s T-Up, Takenaka Corporation’s ‘roof push up method’ and Obayashi Corporation’s ABCs system, to name just four.  Though many of the systems are not in use today, they demonstrate the scale to which ‘layer by layer’ assembly systems can operate at, in the construction environment.  There will, for example, be many applications of Freeform Construction where both mobility and deployability will become important.  For smaller residential or light commercial construction projects, a gantry system could first be erected before construction begins.  For applications such as disaster relief and construction in arid environments, mobile Freeform Construction machines could be driven out to the site and may resemble a concrete boom pump device.  The key to these devices is in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU), which implies that the build material is sourced locally and loaded into the machine for building to begin.  This means anything from mud to light aggregate material which can be crushed and mixed with a binder for deposition.

EMERGENCY, SUBMERSIBLE AND STEALTH STRUCTURES

Moving beyond mobility, deployability introduces the concept of sending remote construction platforms into unusual or hazardous environments.  Submersible Freeform Construction methods become attractive as the buoyancy of water eliminates the effect of gravity to allow habitats to be built without the machine having to be firmly rooted to the ground.  Freeform Construction also allows for Hermetic structures to be considered as the deposition process is continuous and not based on the assembly of many individual components and gaskets.  For military applications, we are looking at ‘Stealth’ structures.  As the structure is deposited, Freeform Construction allows different materials to be introduced selectively in different parts of the structure.  Although this would normally be applied to optimised structures, in this context it would mean the introduction of energy deflective particulates or low observability (LO) materials, to impart the structure with false energy signatures.  Using the ISRU principle, Freeform Construction machines can be deployed into combat environments where they will build self-contained and self-regulating homeostatic structures.  Believe it or not, increasingly the Military has to meet environmental requirements and cannot walk away from a battle scene and leave rubbish for someone else to clear up.  What’s attractive about ISRU, is that once the bunker has served its purpose, the hardware is removed and the structure collapses back into the ground. 

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© 2005 Rupert Soar. All rights reserved.