The Bovay Civil Infrastructure Laboratory Complex, located in the basement of Thurston Hall, has a new tenant: a roughly 6,000-pound industrial robot capable of 3D printing the kind of large-scale structures that could potentially transform the construction industry, making it more efficient and sustainable by eliminating the waste of traditional material manufacturing.
The process of 3D printing—also known as additive manufacturing—has already led to breakthroughs in product prototyping and biomedicine. When it comes to large construction projects, however, many questions remain about how 3D-printed structures will perform in the real world.
