The team at Witteveen+Bos in collaboration with the Eindhoven University of Technologies (TU/e) and Nanyang Technological University has been researching techniques of 3d printing in fresh concrete for the AEC industry. The continuous struggle is to accurately simulate the structural behaviour of such 3d printed structures, where the material and structural properties change over a short amount of time. Often structural analyses seem to overestimate the overall stability of the printed structure.

In collaboration with the team at Karamba3D, Shaun Wu of Witteveen+Bos has developed a tool to help study the performance of 3d printed concrete structures to predict buckling and collapse failure. The tool draws on research from the TU/e in simulating material behavior and the age of each printed layer. By increasing the number of layers printed it is possible to anticipate failure in the structure due to buckling in the structure under self-weight and apply fixes in the design such as adding internal structure to relieve this. Comparisons are made between the physical studies and the Karamba3D analysis as well as results from Abacus.