The Bovay Civil Infrastructure Laboratory Complex, located in the basement of Thurston Hall, has a new tenant: a roughly 6,000-pound industrial robot capable of 3D printing the kind of large-scale structures that could potentially transform the construction industry, making it more efficient and sustainable by eliminating the waste of traditional material manufacturing.

The process of 3D printing – also known as additive manufacturing – has already led to breakthroughs in product prototyping and biomedicine. When it comes to large construction projects, however, many questions remain about how 3D-printed structures will perform in the real world.

With its ability to test and validate fabricated materials and structures of all types and sizes, the Bovay Lab is particularly well-suited to put large-scale 3D printing through the motions – and the stresses and the strains.

Cornell is now one of only a handful of universities in the U.S. to have such a system. Not only will it enable College of Engineering faculty to do robotic construction research, it will also give students hands-on experience in the fast-growing technological area within civil infrastructure, according to Derek Warner, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

“Robotic masonry (brick laying), printing with recycled plastics and printing with metal at a large scale are all exciting areas with lots of room for growth, both in terms of science and understanding, as well as technology and engineering,” Warner said. “The scaling of many of the phenomena controlling the build processes are such that they need to be studied at a scale near to that in which they will be used. The same applies to some of the phenomena controlling performance. Plus, there are always the unknown surprises that occur when up-scaling early-on with a new technology.”

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