Avenco 3D’s Thermal and Concreter 3D Printers

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Avenco 3D’s Thermal and Concreter 3D Printers

Avenco 3D builds the printing head rather than the whole machine, mounting concrete and thermoplastic extruders on KUKA robot arms carried by a tracked crawler or a mobile rail.

Most construction 3D printers are a giant steel gantry that you assemble around the building site. Avenco, out of Istanbul, skipped that part entirely.

They build the piece that does the actual work, the extruder, and bolt it onto a KUKA robot arm.

There are two families of head.

On the concrete side, the 1K extruder weighs 25 kilos and has no moving parts, so there is almost nothing to service. The 2K version adds a mixer and injects accelerator right inside the mixing chamber, so the concrete stiffens faster and the arm can print overhangs instead of just straight walls.

Both push up to 35 litres a minute, with layer heights anywhere from 5 to 30 millimetres. The 2K runs up to 20,000 millimetres a minute, which is 20 metres of wall in a minute, and gets layer times under 10 seconds.

Then the plastic side. The AVEX extruders take pellets instead of filament, run up to 450 degrees, and handle glass and carbon fibre reinforced material. The biggest one lays down 50 kilos an hour, for boat hulls, moulds, furniture and composite tooling.

The other half of the problem is moving a robot arm around a site. Avenco’s answer is a tracked crawler, 2.3 tonnes, with four hydraulic jacks to level itself on rough ground. Or a mobile rail up to 12 metres long that the arm rides as a seventh axis, holding about a millimetre of accuracy every 10 metres.

The company started in 2014 building factory robots. It says it delivered Turkey’s first 3D printed buildings in 2018.

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