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Clay robotics: A hybrid 3D printing casting process

Conference Paper · April 2017

DOI: 10.1201/9781315198101-20

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 Clay Robotics: a hybrid 3D printing casting process
S. Wang & S. Dritsas
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
P. Morel
EZCT Architecture & Design Research, Paris, France
K. Ho
REX, New York, USA

ABSTRACT: This paper presents the research work for the design and development of an innovative 3D
printing process which employs clay as the material for the production of geometrically complex molds for
building scale applications in construction. The objective of this approach is to efficiently and economically
fabricate forms for casting, such as concrete or metals which can be easily post-processed and finished. Our
perspective is informed by the appreciation of the difficulties in achieving high-quality finish in vis-
cous/granulate material extrusion, such as clay or concrete, for architectural parts that need to achieve a wide
range of resolutions without significant and often laborious post-processing. We thus employ clay as an abun-
dant, low-cost, environmentally friendly material for mold making that can be both easily post-processed if
required and disposed or recycled.

Keywords: Digital Fabrication, Additive Manufacture, Design Computation, Architectural Robotics.

for cladding applications (Epps, 2014), wire cut

1 INTRODUCTION
The development of software for Computer Aided
Design and Manufacturing (CAD & CAM), includ-
ing parametric and visual programming system, as
well as the dramatic drop in the cost of digital fabri-
cation hardware such as computer numeric control
machines and industrial robotics (UNESCE, 2005)
created opportunities for design research within Ar-
chitecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC).
Additive manufacturing principles originally em-
ployed for rapid prototyping as far back as the
1980’s are now becoming integral part of the vision
for this century’s modernization of manufacturing
and perhaps the design and production of buildings
or parts thereof.
Pioneering work in advanced methods of digital
fabrication for the AEC industry extend as far back
the turn of the century with prominent examples in
early automation in construction (Cousineau &
Miura, 1998; Gambao, et al. 2000) innovations in
architectural design such as fabrication of parametric
assemblies using industrial robotics (Gramazio &
Kohler, 2008), folding of sheet metal using robotics
forms for concrete construction (Søndergaard, 2014)
and the fiber-woven pavilion (Doerstelmann et al.
2015). In addition, there is extensive research work
in additive manufacturing for building scale applica-
tions using primarily the principle of material extru-
sion with materials including concrete and clay
(Khoshnevis, 2002; Leach et al. 2012; Jokic et al.
2012; Peters, 2013; Van Herpt, 2014; Sun et al.
2014) relevant to our research work.
The key challenge with additive manufacturing
for the AEC industry is mainly scale. Architectural
artefacts span circa six orders of magnitude, from
millimeter to often hundreds of meters. As such
technologies developed for 3D printing of small pro-
totypes face severe obstacles of production time effi-
ciency to achieve multiple and variable levels of res-
olution. Additional challenges include the resolution
of structural issues such material performance char-
acteristics and construction considerations such the
need for support of horizontal elements such as slabs
and beams. Finally, the end 3D printed products typ-
ically require additional labor time for post-
processing and finishing.
As such current additive manufacturing technolo-
gies are uncompetitive against optimized and effi-
cient methods of industrial standardized production
and/or pre-fabrication. Thus effectively producing
large scale 3D printed physical artifacts and architec-
tural components has been a central challenge in the
field of digital design and fabrication. Successful
resolution of some of those challenges has the poten-
tial to impact future research, architecture thinking
and the methods of design and construction.
The approach presented in this paper is hybrid as
it is based on pre-fabrication of clay molds using ad-
ditive manufacturing principles for subsequently
casting building components such as concrete or
even metal parts. Rather than direct production of
building elements our system combines the ad-
vantages of additive technologies such as the capa-
bility for production of free-form geometries but also
avoids such problems as the material performance of
the end-product and achieving multiple resolutions
within the same process. Compared with direct addi-
tive 3D printing our process offers an alternative or
perhaps transitional method for manufacturing com-
plex physical artifacts with a higher levels of worka-
bility, efficiency and a potentially lower cost.
2 DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL PROCESS
OVERVIEW
The design, development and evaluation of our
system is organized along the following research
tasks: (1) Material Characteristics: Understanding
the properties of clay as 3D printed material, (2)
Tool Building: Integration of industrial robotics with
a clay extrusion system, (3) Digital Design to Fabri-
cation: Translation of digital design geometries into
physical artifacts.
2.1 Material characters
The materials employed at this phase of develop-
ment are: clay used for mold making and concrete
for casting. Clay molds can be used in fired or un-
fired form for casting many other materials. At this
stage we opted for concrete as a common material
for construction. Furthermore, we focused the mate-
rial investigation on clay which is the material used
for additive manufacturing and requires understand-
ing of its key characteristics and properties.
Clay, a natural material comprised of rock/soil
granulates mixed with water and other trace minerals
and organics, is a culturally loaded material used for
utilitarian applications, arts and crafts as well as per-
haps one the earliest materials for building construc-
tion. It has numerous advantages as a building mate-
rial such as its high compressive strength while
being highly plastic and easy to form compared to
stone masonry, along with its low cost due to its nat-
ural sourcing. Without being kilned into bricks, clay
has been rendered obsolete in favor of modern in-
dustrial products. However, such benefits as its
abundance, low embodied energy and mandate for
sustainable building construction has resurrected in-
terest in clay products. Clay can be freely shaped and
manipulated (Peterson & Peterson 2014), while also
being mechanically rigid and heat resistant to act as
a formwork especially useful in high temperature
processes such as investment molding of metal parts.
The properties of clay can be modified through its
water content in order to control its viscosity such
that it can be employed for additive manufacturing
extrusion processes. Viscosity is such a key charac-
teristic that impacts:
1. Production: the extrusion material flow rate
and printing speed, adhesion between layers and the
mechanical design of the extruder itself in terms of
torque requirement.
2. Mechanical: the final holding strength, total
drying time and maximum height of the mold for
concrete casting.
3. Product: the surface finish as well as the
range of achievable mold geometries.
We performed extensive testing to determine ap-
propriate water to clay ratios. Conventional viscome-
ters are typically not manufactured to operate at the
range of viscosities exhibited by clay (Fig. 1). In-
stead, the moisture content of clay was inferred us-
ing moisture meters which reflect its viscosity. We
purchased raw clay which exhibited variations of its
water content, such as all natural materials, with av-
erage ratio of 27%.
Figure 1, Clay viscosity testing with viscometer. Weight pro-
portion of clay and water range from 1:1 to 5:1.
Determining the optimal water to clay mix ratio
however is not trivial as the aforementioned design
parameters often counteract one another. For in-
stance, lower viscosities simplify extrusion and ex-
hibit better adhesion and surface finish qualities but
they are detrimental to the mechanical characteristics
of the mold and drying time. High viscosities result
to stronger and higher molds with faster curing times
but they require significant mechanical torque for
extrusion, they limit the range of achievable geome-
tries as sharp corners produce cracks and the quality
of the casts is inferior as the clay absorbs water from
the concrete which induces fragility. Through our
experiments we determined a balance point between
the aforementioned criteria within the range of water
to clay ratios of 35-40% (Fig. 2).
Figure 2, Clay moisture testing with moisture meter. Moisture
range from 15% to 40%. Each piece of clay rings weighs 200g.
2.2 Tool building
The digital fabrication process for our 3D clay ex-
trusion system is organized into two sub-systems:
the positioning apparatus that allows control of loca-
tion and motion of deposition; and the extrusion ap-
paratus which includes the material feeder, conveyor
and nozzle sub-systems. For the positioning system
we employed a six-axis industrial robot available at
the lab and focused on the development of the clay
extrusion system. The design factors of the extruder
include: the pump torque and pressure characteristics
for feeding rather viscous material, length and diam-
eter of transfer piping, weight and volume of materi-
al and the flow rate through the extruder nozzle.
Figure 3, First version of clay extruder prototype driven by
electric hand screw driver & second version prototype (left).
The initial prototype design (Fig. 3) borrows
principles of the Archimedes or auger conveyor
screws often used in industrial machinery for dense,
viscous and/or granulate materials. It also the most
common apparatus found in processing equipment
for clay such as pug mills. The key challenges with
the first iteration of tooling were the control of clog-
ging and back-flow of material due to pressure build
up within the cylinder chamber due to viscosity, the
inability of bidirectional control the material flow
and variable dispensing beyond using constant speed
within one continuous extrusion motion.
The next prototype was built with a small-scale
progressive cavity rotor with a soft-body rubber sta-
tor (Fig. 3). This was intended to create a seal at the
nozzle, holding the material in by suction, which
would act as a valve for the material extrusion. The
aim of this design was allow precise starting and
stopping of the extrusion, as well as the speed and
amount of material metered and deposited.
In order to have a constant material supply, the
concept of a pump was employed for the experiment,
parameters include the amount of torque and pres-
sure needed to move the material, which was de-
pendent on the material viscosity, the material
weight and volume, the length and diameter of the
transfer pipe, and the friction caused by the material
movement against the pump (Fig. 4).
Figure 4, Concepts’ evolution of material-supply pump.
The final design employed a commercial extru-
sion nozzle for viscous material which integrated all
of the characteristics of the prototypes. The nozzle-
centric setup has a stationary extrusion nozzle, and a
moving base that follows a designated toolpath (Fig.
5). The major advantage is that the material is ex-
truded at a much shorter distance, which means a
higher viscosity clay can be used. The disadvantage
is that this setup is not easily scalable due to the lim-
it height of the nozzle. Ultimately, the base-centric
setup with a progressive cavity pump for viscous
material is ideal for large-scale clay printing.
Figure 5, Nozzle-centric extrusion system with a 500mm tall
clay mold.
2.3 Digital design and fabrication
The typical 3D printing CAD/CAM process fa-
miliar through rapid prototyping involves a sequence
of tasks starting from the geometric modeling of sol-
ids objects which are subsequently converted to
mesh triangulations for mainly interoperability and
precomputation of discretization. The machine path
for typically 3-axis CNC machine is produced by
first contouring the geometry and the producing an
internal web within closed polygons to increase pro-
duction speed and reduce material use and weight.
Our approach at this stage is more experimental
as we generatively produce machine paths for direct
drive of the robotic system. Additional work is re-
quired for one to one mapping between the digital
and physical artifact within tolerance. Overall the
process involves computation within the visual pro-
gramming environment of Rhinoceros / Grasshopper
which produces geometric representations of ma-
chine paths converted to robot code using HAL-
Robot software add-on. The initial experiments em-
ployed topologically complex geometries to demon-
strate the free-form geometric capabilities of the 3D
printing process and integrate the material deposition
logic within the tool path generation.
Similar to rapid prototyping filament printing
technologies we prioritized the exterior surface of
the solid object by directly tracing along its contour.
This is to ensure the best finishing results. However,
for additional reinforcement and ensuring cement-
tightness of the mold we duplicate and overlap an
additional interior layer of clay using offset geome-
try. This adds some limitation on the minimum wall
thickness being at least twice the diameter of the
nozzle (10 mm). In addition, contouring was offset
vertically to 80% of the extruded bead diameter to
ensure material adhesion between layers and miti-
gate progressive material compaction. As such the
maximum achievable height of mold segments built
by successive layering is 500mm.
The internal web strategy, when required to infill
solid compartments and/or reinforce the external sur-
face, was informed by the desire to simplify the cou-
pling between the robotic system motion profile and
constant extrusion material flow. Robotics don’t ex-
hibit the same stiffness and accuracy as Cartesian
CNC systems and their position is approximate via
interim path points within tolerance due to the trape-
zoidal motion profile. We thus implemented a
smooth continuous infill pathing strategy (Fig. 6)
that resolves the constant velocity coupling and
avoids sharp corners where the approximation re-
sults into gaps.
Figure 6, Plaster model with its molds whose tool paths are
constant smooth curves.
3 DESIGN EXPERIMENTS
Figure 7, 2000mm Tall plaster column casted and stack with 4
pieces.
A series of experimental designs (Fig. 7) were
fabricated to evaluate the capabilities of the material
and the printing system. Those aimed to assist in the
characterization of the geometric range of possibili-
ties, highlight the limitations of the approach and
guide the research forward. Parameters such as max-
imum build height without significant vertical com-
paction, horizontal deviation from the original shape
due to successive layer compression for ensuring ad-
hesion, overhang tapering capability without support
structure, introduction of geometric discontinuities
and the behavior around sharp corner were exam-
ined. For instance, several overhang tests were per-
formed to determine the maximum printing angle in
section without support with so far 45 degrees being
the best result. In addition, within our 35-40% water
to clay ratio there is a maximum height of 500mm
above which the clay self-compresses producing in-
accurate results. The results of those tests are to in-
form the upstream modeling process of the geomet-
ric limitations or to be mitigated using untapped
aspects such a feed modulation, better motion speed
control, nozzle shape design etc. Additional tests re-
quired include the determination of mold wall thick-
ness in relationship to height which is relevant to
swelling deformation due to hydrostatic pressure of
the concrete.
Figure 8, Reinforced concrete column with half demolded clay
and its plaster sealed mold.
To evaluate the boundary condition of the clay
extrusion system from the perspective of post-
processing required for large scale mold making, we
built a complex 1.4m tall circa 300mm diameter col-
umn (Fig. 8) with seven interconnected branches,
which would otherwise be difficult to construct us-
ing traditional formworks. The mold was segmented
into sections and joints between consecutive seg-
ments were sealed to prevent concrete leakage. Line-
ar steel reinforcement bars were inserted and the
mold was filled with 200Kg of concrete. Challenges
that became evident after the fabrication of the col-
umn include clay shrinkage of approximate 5% due
to evaporation and the gravity, perimeter expansion
due to hydrostatic pressure. In conclusion, such
complex interaction between geometry, machinery
and material requires prolonged study to correlate
between digital and physical in order to achieve im-
proved results.
4 CONCLUSIONS
A large number of research groups investigate a
workable process to achieve large scale additive
manufacture for the architecture, engineering and the
construction industry. We presented the design, de-
velopment and evaluation of our project to share the
knowledge and highlight the challenges and oppor-
tunities within the material, digital design and fabri-
cation domains. Our clay mold fabrication approach
addresses the problem of scale while bridging the
gap between the predominant mode of pre-
fabrication used today and additive processes of the
future.
The aspects we are moving towards in the next
phase of research design and development, beyond
mitigating the challenges demonstrated, include mul-
ti-material printing in the form of simultaneous clay
and concrete pouring and investigate the tectonic
opportunities of 3D printing aware architectural de-
sign.
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