3D printed house built in 5 days inaugurated in IIT-M

With a built up area of about 600 square feet, the single-storey home has one bedroom, hall and kitchen. It was designed and developed by Tvasta’s indigenous ‘Concrete 3D Printing’ technology. After unveiling the house, Minister Sitharaman said that India definitely needs such solutions that do not require much time to meet the Centre’s goal of housing for all by 2022. Meeting that deadline and making sure that people who need houses get it at an affordable price were big challenges, she said. Conventional construction methods require time, material and logistics, but if this technology can construct houses in different locales at five days per house, it would not be a big challenge to build 100 million houses by 2022, she said.

“I think the Technology Sub-Mission, which is working under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), also has a project called ‘Light House Project’, wherein in Indore, Chennai and a few other places are building 1,000 houses each through innovative technologies in 12 months,” the Minister said, adding that such new technology would help meet the target for affordable houses.

‘Concrete 3D Printing’ is an automated manufacturing method to construct structures of all realisable scales. It utilises a concrete 3D printer, which accepts a computerised three-dimensional design file from the user and fabricates a 3D structure in a layer-by-layer manner by extruding a specialised type of concrete specifically designed for the purpose.