Students compete to develop marketable 3D printed concrete products

Students from four Estonian higher education institutions competed in 3D printing concrete, with a team from the Pallas Higher School of Art winning for its modular outdoor kitchen, ERR reported.

The task for students from the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Pallas and Tallinn University of Applied Sciences was to design a practical concrete element that could potentially enter production.

The winning project was created by students studying interior product design at Pallas. The team designed an outdoor kitchen from modules to make transport easier, reduce weight and simplify production, which they said could increase its market potential.

Concrete 3D printing has been practised in Estonia for about a decade. Aivars Alt, a senior lecturer at Tallinn University of Applied Sciences, said printed concrete had significant aesthetic and practical potential.

“Thanks to the robot, we can place the material where it is needed and where the structure requires it,” Alt said. He added that efficient structures could make construction more sustainable in the long term.

Judges said all the prototypes produced during the competition could potentially be manufactured. The Estonian University of Life Sciences team’s fence modules, for example, offer numerous possible combinations.

Printing one module for the winning project took about 1,500 seconds. Team member Villiam Sillanurm said the result exceeded the team’s expectations and that the complications they had feared had been resolved.