Like any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer uses pipe layer by layer to build an object — except this printer is more than 45 feet (13.7 meters) wide, weighs 4.75 tons, and prints on residential homes.
This summer, ICON’s robotic printer is finishing construction of some of the 100 3D-printed homes at the Wolf Ranch community in Georgetown, Texas. Wolf Ranch is located about 30 miles from Austin.
ICON will begin printing the walls of the world’s largest 3D-printed community in November 2022. The company says 3D printing homes is faster, less expensive, requires fewer workers and wastes less building material than traditional construction.
“This brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market,” said Connor Jenkins, ICON’s senior project manager. “So, where there used to be maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”
After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed together and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes the concrete mixture onto a brush like toothpaste, and builds layer by layer along a pre-programmed path, creating walls with a corduroy effect.
Printing for one-story, three- to four-bedroom houses takes about three weeks to complete, while foundations and metal roofs are installed traditionally.
The concrete walls are designed to be resistant to water, mold, termites and extreme weather, Jenkins said.
Lawrence Nowrazad, a 32-year-old business development director, and his girlfriend, Angela Hontas, a 29-year-old creative strategist, bought a home in Wolf Ranch earlier this summer.
“It feels like a fortress,” Noorzad said, adding that he’s confident it will be able to withstand most tornadoes.
The walls provide strong insulation from the Texas heat, the couple said, and keep the temperature inside cool even when the air conditioner isn’t on full blast.
However, 3D-printed walls appear to provide protection from one more thing: strong wireless internet connections.
“Obviously these walls are very strong and thick. And that’s what makes them very valuable to us as homeowners and keeps it well insulated in the Texas summer, but the signal doesn’t transmit very well through these walls,” Noorzad said.
To mitigate this problem, an ICON spokesperson said most Wolf Ranch homeowners use mesh internet routers, which broadcast a signal from multiple units located throughout the home, while a traditional router sends a signal from a single device.
The 3D-printed homes at Wolf Ranch, called the “Genesis Collection” by the developers, range in price from about $450,000 to close to $600,000. The developers said a little more than a quarter of the 100 homes have been sold.
ICON, which 3D-printed its first home in Austin in 2018, hopes to one day take its technology to the moon. NASA has contracted ICON to develop a construction system capable of building landing pads, shelters and other structures on the lunar surface, as part of its Artemis Moon Exploration Program.
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