Ireland gets world’s first printed social houses

[bnew]

Ireland gets world’s first printed social houses - Global Construction Review

The world’s first printed concrete social housing project has gone up in Ireland – a terrace of three, 3-bedroom houses in Grange Close, Dundalk, County Louth.

www.globalconstructionreview.com

Ireland gets world’s first printed social houses​

Rod Sweet

17.12.24

Crews finished the structure in 132 days from initial site preparation to key-handover (Courtesy of Cobod)

The world’s first printed concrete social housing project has gone up in Ireland – a terrace of three, 3-bedroom houses in Grange Close, Dundalk, County Louth.​

The 330-sq-m development was a collaboration between Louth County Council, 3D print specialist Harcourt Technologies (HTL.tech), and building material company Roadstone.

Using a construction printer made by Danish manufacturer Cobod, crews finished the structure in 132 days from initial site preparation to key-handover.

Cobod said that was a 35% time reduction on the 203 days typically required using traditional construction methods.

The walls were printed in 12 days, including printer setup and takedown time. The entire structure was completed in 18 days, Cobod said.

Printing uderway at the site in Dundalk, County Louth (Courtesy of HTL.tech)

The load-bearing wall system is designed to meet the Eurocode 6 masonry standard.

Walls at Grange Close have two 10cm-thick skins with a 150mm cavity in between. No reinforcement or columns were needed.

Some 90 cubic metres of C30/37-EN206-compliant concrete with a compression strength of 47 MPa were used.

The structure complies with the ISO/ASTM 52939:2023 standard for additive manufacturing, which Ireland has adopted.

HTL.tech director Justin Kinsella said the Cobod printer allowed the project “to establish new industry standards and offer an effective means to produce high-quality, sustainable housing at an accelerated rate”.

In October, HTL.tech won the Standards Innovation Award from the National Standards Authority of Ireland.

 

[bnew]

 

[Dorian Breh]

Its actually not a great application to only build one structure. Once you go through all the trouble to set up you want to do a whole development.

Cement is pretty bad for the environment, not sure if this is truly "sustainable".

The key way this would add efficiency is being able to be "lights off" working 24 hours with just one or two people monitoring on the night shift watching screens.

Building a development like this in 130 days isn't really that impressive. Its cool but as the article said, its a 30% beat against the average. That means that there are probably traditional crews who do it just as fast.

Cool proof of concept. I'd love to see solutions like this for our current housing crisis. I'm not blown away.

 

[Kisame]

 

[RickyDiBiase]

Must be nice to live in a country where people give a shyt

 

[Heimdall]

I wonder what the lifespan of houses like these would be. And if they get unreasonably hot in summer.