Photo Credit: WASP Team/YouTube
Some companies that make 3D printers stick to desktop-sized units. WASP is not one of them. They do it all, from filament-fed units to giant machines that print whole buildings.
In 2015, WASP introduced the 40-foot tall BigDelta. They used it to print a basically zero-cost adobe home in about three days.
Last week they unveiled the newest addition to their lineup. It’s called the Crane WASP and it can print much larger and more complex structures.
Its design is fairly similar to the BigDelta, but the Crane WASP is modular. That’s a single unit in the image at the top of this post. Additional units can be connected for bigger jobs.
One Crane WASP can print a structure with a diameter of 21.6 feet to a height of roughly 10 feet. Like the BigDelta, the Crane WASP can utilize materials that are found on or near the building site. In particular, WASP wanted to focus on “[using] natural waste materials, coming from the rice production chain.”
To demonstrate its capabilities, WASP mixed together soil, rice husks, straw, and hydraulic lime. That mix was used to print a 322 square foot home the company calls Gaia.
The total printing time was 10 days. Other 3D-printed structures have gone up more quickly, but they’ve typically been produced using concrete. When you’re going for a low-cost structure that also has a minimal impact on the environment (as WASP was) concrete is simply not a good choice.
Gaia isn’t a pure adobe structure and there were some additional costs involved. About $1,000 was spent on lumber, windows and doors. WASP says the home is “a highly performing module both in terms of energy and indoor health, with an almost zero environmental impact.”
It performs just as well in winter and summer, according to WASP. Granted, that’s winter and summer in Ravenna, Italy which means the spread is from around 36 degrees to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but that’s an impressive feat when you consider the speed with which Gaia was built, its cost and its eco-friendliness.