Current digital clay fabrication techniques comply with the innate material behavior of clay by extruding in two-dimensional layers. This method inevitably uses an excess amount of material and is a time-consuming process that does not take advantage of the viscous properties of clay. However, if utilizing spatial print trajectories with embedded print parameters (e.g. print speed and extrusion rate) can control the extrusion behavior of the material then the actions of anchor, drag, and pull of the clay can be simulated at the nozzle tip. The aforementioned spatial print trajectory can then form a voxel that can be heterogeneously controlled in order to quickly form self-supporting complex geometries with different density, macroporosity, and structural rigidity. The print path can also be scaled up to exploit the potential of digital fabrication at the construction scale.

This project was presented and published at Rob|Arch 2018. Link

Project Team : Hyeonji Claire Im, Sulaiman AlOthman, Francisco Jung, Martin Bechthold.

Sponsors: Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences.