Steel Reinforced 3D Printing Concrete Housing Building and Its Modular Assembly Construction

To solve the issues of aging population, insufficient labor force, poor construction accuracy, and insufficient disaster resistance of building faced by farmers in housing construction, a modular assembly construction technology combined with digital building design and additive intelligent construction was used herein to design and construct a residential courtyard in northern China. Dig-ital simulation was adopted to establish spatial models for space planning of over-all yard firstly, and then refine the design according to the building space and structural functions. Based on the personalized design requirements, architectural design of house building was carried out, and a 3D digital building model, that can be perspective recognition, was established. Then, this 3D building model was imported into a calculation software for building structural design according to the structural design standards of concrete building. According to the require-ments of environment, structural safety, and durability of concrete structures, the printing and cast materials, details of hollow walls and the inside filled insulation materials, and the size of reinforced concrete beams and columns were deter-mined. Based on the function and assembly construction requirements, the build-ing was divided into different modules. These digital modules were transferred into a concrete 3D printing system for printing. After 7 days of curing, the printed modules were transported to the site for assembly. To ensure the structural integ-rity, load-bearing capacity, and seismic resistance of the assembled building, dif-ferent modules are reliably connected through specially designed steel connec-tions, spatial reinforcements and cast-in-place concrete. To maintain thermal in-sulation and save energy, the cavities of printed walls were filled with insulation materials. The practice verified that the proposed method had outstanding tech-nical advantages over traditional construction techniques such as high precision, high efficiency, digitization, excellent seismic performance, insulation, and en-ergy-saving. It can integrate additive manufacturing with assembly construction to achieve intelligent construction of concrete housing buildings.