As an additive manufacturing method, 3D printing has been characterized by the construction of objects through the horizontal deposition of material, layer by layer. This still restricts, nonetheless, the manufacture of elements and limits the shape of early prototypes to within the range that allows the addition of material in a single direction, making it difficult to create complex shapes with smooth curves.
However, the team from the Chair of Digital Construction Technologies at ETH Zurich—integrating computational design, digital manufacturing, and new materials—has been exploring an innovative non-planar robotic additive manufacturing system. This method facilitates the printing of thin structures with double curvature, significantly expanding the possibilities of their application in architecture on a larger scale.
To test the success of non-planar robotic 3D printing, the team has created 'Fluid Forms', a beautiful shell 2 meters high and 140 cm wide, composed of translucent PETG plastic mixed with blue and silver tones. During the nearly 3-week manufacturing process, the robotic arm nimbly followed non-planar printing paths in a design inspired by Costa's minimal surface. This family of shapes minimizes the area for a given boundary, resulting in a geometry with notable structural properties. The prototype was then completed through print paths aligned with its main curvature directions.
What are the advantages of this technology? In addition to reducing the need for sacrificial support and boosting material economy, non-planar 3D printing improves precision and surface quality in areas of high curvature.
As the team explains, "the print path orientation is controlled through a vector-field optimization method that has been fine-tuned for the specific needs and constraints of non-planar 3D printing. To increase the rigidity of the structure, undulations are introduced that are orthogonal to the print direction." The 40-piece, 120-kilogram structure has been assembled through a dry method using screws to facilitate its disassembly and reuse of its parts once the useful life of the project has ended.
These advances not only maximize the agility of robotic manufacturing to achieve greater productivity and efficiency but also more explicitly reveal the logic of the geometry that supports the final element, uncovering a hidden layer of information. "The shape allows for surprising look-throughs while walking around, at times taking the role of an opaque boundary and at times of a transparent curtain. With this, it offers a perspective on an architecture that blurs boundaries between inside and outside and is full of colors and surprises," they add.
Find more information about nonplanar layered morphologies here.
Chair: Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich
Design and Fabrication: Ioanna Mitropoulou
Advisors: Prof. Benjamin Dillenburger, Prof. Olga Diamanti, Prof. Amir Vaxman
Technical support: Tobias Hartmann, Philippe Fleischmann, Matthias Leschok
Documentation: Dominik Vogel, Andrei Jipa
