Meet Vulcan II, the printer
The printer is named Vulcan II and it was made by ICON, an Austin-based construction technology company. It took three years of prototyping to get a printer capable of this project, the company said. While Vulcan II is building two 500-square-foot houses at the same time, it's capable of building a 2,000-square-foot house, according to ICON. The printer can build walls almost 9 feet high and 28 feet wide. The speed of homebuilding with the printer has gotten quicker. In March 2018, New Story and ICON revealed a three-bedroom home, which took 48 hours to build. "It's 10 times better than we were a year ago. I am so proud," ICON CEO and co-founder Jason Ballard told CNN on Wednesday. "It is so rare that the-most-in-need of our sisters and brothers globally get first access to advanced technologies and breakthroughs in materials science." Because 3D printing is cheaper and faster than traditional construction, there's great potential for how it will change the world, he said. "We think part of what 3D printing allows us to do is to deliver a much higher-quality product to the housing market at a speed and price that's typically not available for people in" low-income housing, Ballard said. "It is a house that anyone would be proud to live in." Taking a printer out of the lab and putting it in the real world was an experiment in itself. Getting Vulcan II to the construction site and dealing with harsh weather conditions has been the biggest challenge so far, he said. The massive printer was transported in a standard shipping container. Border authorities had a lot of questions when they saw it, New Story said. It arrived at the peak of summer, right as the rainy season was beginning, Ballard said. The machinery and the staff faced floods, muddy roads and high humidity as they settled in. The logistical challenges made him realize how much we take for granted in America.The technnology holds promise for affordable housing
"When you're doing anything for the first time ever ... and we're doing a challenging place, there's no blueprint or roadmap or set of instructions, so you're creating all of that as we go," Alexandria Lafci, New Story COO and co-founder, told CNN. The nonprofit staff believes in the promise of what the technology could mean for people who don't have safe shelter. Hagler said safe shelter is "one of the largest crises affecting humanity today." About 1.6 billion people in the world don't have adequate housing, according to a 2015 Habitat for Humanity study. A family sits inside one of the two newly constructed 3D-printed homes in Mexico. "We seem to just accept that there will always be homelessness or there will always be people who don't have any access to education or water," Lafci said. "We have some of the brightest minds and we have the most promising technology in Silicon Valley working on elite problems. How can we rethink and reshape existing and budding technology toward these more pressing issues?" she said.DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
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