Digital manufacturing of reinforcement in a free-form concrete structure

Abstract

This research paper is a TU Delft Master’s thesis for graduation track in the field of Building Technology. Its main theme, digital manufacturing of reinforced concrete structures, has already been studied/researched by many other enthusiasts; but they adopted approaches mainly based on the digital production of formworks or 3D printing of concrete. None or very few re-searchers have tried tackling this topic by only investigating the reinforcement production methods. Reinforcement is an essen-tial part of any concrete structure and neglecting its role in de-veloping techniques of digital manufacturing concrete structure makes the technique unreliable. Therefore this report ap-proached this topic according to the suitable production tech-niques for reinforcement structures of freeform concrete struc-tures. Various techniques and concepts in production of rein-forcement structures have been designed and one chosen. This chosen concept got developed into its last minute details as well as its assemblage process got demonstrated on a freeform wall structure.
All the stages are also fully explained providing a source of in-spiration for anyone interested in the topic to employ the pre-sented research in creation of other possible systems.
Those research related to production technique which is done by the researcher of this report, can also be employed in other fields such as lattice mesh structure production or 3D printing of carbon fibers.