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Right now I'm standing inside the world's first 3D printed house to receive a building permit.
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This house was originally built in about 48 hours with Vulcan 1 our first generation printer.
Now the Vulcan 1 was always kind of a first generation proof of concept technology.
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My name is Jason Ballard, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of ICON.
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ICON is a construction technology company working in robotics.
Software and advance materials to help lower the calls, increase the speed, and increase the quality of housing,
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So it's just announced this week, now that the Vulcan II is ready to go into production and go out to the world, we're gonna break ground world's very first 3D printing community in Latin America this summer.
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From the technology standpoint we've built a stack of software.
And so, you move through a digital design of home.
You select the home you want to print, and it's sort of as simple as pressing print.
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So the Vulcan 1 printer can print homes up to about 500 square feet in size.
Now with Vulcan 2 we're now able to print up to about 2,000 square feet detached single family structure.
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So where we are right now, what makes this house notable is the first time that any organization in America had successfully pulled a building permit, and then 3D printed a house.
But it was the first of it's kind, and we learned a lot, and we learned different ways to improve it.
You can see the way the printing happens is it prints the house in layers.
And you can see on our first shot there, a few blemishes included in the wall.
So over the past six months we've really tackled this problem.
Our current printing process We reduced the rate blemishes down to less than 1%.
Also you can kinda get a sense of the process here.
What happens?
Is you lay the foundation, you did the site prep very traditionally then the print comes in and delivers the entire wall system And then you do fit finish like windows, ceiling.
And then you do electrical and plumbing systems.
And then you're ready to move in.
The print itself with this house took about forty eight hours of the vulcan one.
With vulcan two, we can do this print in about twenty four hours.
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So the house we are standing here right now is about 350 square feet, we have this common room here, we have an auxiliary room for sitting and reading perhaps, we have the bedroom, and then right this way is the restroom with the shower.
You can see in here is the only room, people ask us all the time, can you do different treatments and finishes to the wall?
And indeed you can, in fact, this is a clay finish that's waterproof, which is why we chose it for the bathroom.
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Our concrete is somewhere kind of between a concrete and a mortar, and we call it lavacrete.
You have to get the material to do a few interesting things to work in the first Instance.
You have to get it to flow appropriately through the system.
But then immediately once it's extruded or printed it has to set up and retain shape and then gain strength very very quickly.
And making all that happen is very tough.
The compressive strength of lava create version that we used on this house Was about three thousand PSI, for comparison, a CMU block has a compressive strength of about fifteen hundred a lavacrete version two which we just released not very long ago has a compressive strength of six thousand PSI so even twice as strong as that, this material is very very strong.
SO strong in fact that we've already started to imagine Would it be possible for us to begin thinking about multi story buildings?
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You can expect us to start printing again like in the next couple of months and the first community that we'll be printing is down in Latin America with New Story, one of our most important partners.
We'll start that Project early summer.
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We've partnered with the Colorado School of Mines, and we've been participating in the NASA 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, because when you think about perhaps colonizing the rest of the solar system.
When we go to Mars, it's not like we're carrying nuts and bolts and screws and lumber.
We need technology that can be operated remotely.
They can use local material, not to build one kind of building but all kinds of different buildings as they're needed.
So I hope one day, some of the first occupied buildings on another planet are 3D printed buildings.
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