My name is Aiman Hussein,
and I am the director of 3D printing at Alquist.
Here at Alquist, we focus on printing homes
that are affordable in the community
and for people in the area.
We range between 1,500 square feet
and 1,300 for a single family.
We use large-scale construction 3D printers
to be able to create affordable housing
in rural and unserved areas.
So, when we arrive on site,
we typically work on a slab or a ribbon footing.
And what we do is we set the printer up
around where the house is going to go.
We typically have around
five or six pieces of equipment,
and that is printer,
and we also have a control panel
to operate and monitor the print settings.
Then on the material side we have a silo,
which holds the dry material,
but directly below that we have a mixing system
and a pumping system.
The water is added in that process
and pumped through a hose,
which then feeds the printer material.
This process isn't very different than
a typical desktop 3D printer.
What you do is you start your design stage
and you create a CAD file that basically
tells the machine where to go
and how fast to do it and how much material
to let out in that specific spot.
And so the program is the centerline
of where the nozzle is,
and the printer will follow that line
throughout the whole process.
The way the printer reads, it's a cross section.
So if you were to draw this up,
and you'd cut out a very thin line of that object,
that's what the machine sees,
and it sees a bunch of those
over and over and over again to complete the house.
The two rails, if you will,
those provide your outer bounds for your wall.
And so in that middle portion
is where you can run electrical, your plumbing.
In a sense we are like a framing company.
However, we're much more of a hands-on system,
where we construct all the walls
and then we guide the GCs through installing
the doors, windows, HVAC, and plumbing systems.
You're doing the house,
and you have to leave cavities for your two doors.
What happens is it kind of
splits that house into two wall sections,
left of the door and right of the door.
And what it'll do is it'll do that wall section,
it'll lift up, go to the other side of the door,
and complete that other wall section.
And then once you're at the top of the door,
what we do is we add a,
I refer to it as a manual support,
and so what we do is we add a steel lintel
that stretches across that window or door,
and then the printer then continues printing
directly over top that system.
Each house consists of around 150 layers.
Each layer is approximately
three-quarters of an inch thick,
and so that makes a standard 9-foot wall.
Based on our current mixed design,
each layer takes around five to 10 minutes
before we add another layer on top of it.
So that's the layer set time,
until it's hard enough to be able to hold weight
for another layer to be added.
And then we try to hold off for around two weeks
before any large load-bearing weight,
such as a roof system, be added.
And concrete reaches the max strength at 28 days.
Nozzle design is really customizable,
especially in the 3D-construction industry.
There's the squared-off nozzle,
where it has a flat aesthetic.
And then there's the rounder nozzle
that leaves a more of a bead look.
They have the same properties
as far as structural design.
It's more of aesthetic finish.
With the printed system, if you wanted
a more structural or more ballistic-based wall,
you could increase the concrete in that wall system
by increasing the nozzle thickness.
What we have is, on this specific nozzle,
the back end of the nozzle
has a raking system.
And so as it goes, it provides those grooves,
and that's just the indicator
of making sure you're at that right height
and allowing the next layer to
smooth it directly over top.
The process and way it's done,
very similar to a brick-laying system,
where you would go around
and you do one layer of bricks,
and then once that layer's finished,
you go to the next one.
It's very similar in that process.
However, the building materials
and the labor-intensive portion of that
is obviously different.
3D-printed homes allow for quicker construction
that are also less expensive
and more durable over a long period of time.
Since we have those two withes,
all our homes are considered thermally broken,
which allows for less utility cost
to maintain the home.
One of the main questions
that I get on my TikTok or personal interactions
is the replacing of manual labor
and people leaving without jobs.
And just want to address that here,
is this technology we see as the answer to
and not the cause of the national job shortage.
We are committed to locally hire
crews to run our machines.
So if we go into a community,
we hire from within that town,
train them on the printer,
and they become our print crew in the area.
And just like any automation company,
it's our duty to replace
any jobs lost through the process.
And so we are working with a lot of universities
across the country to create
a job force development program
to train people on this new system
in this very new industry.