India’s First 3D Printed House Inaugurated at IIT-Madras

CHENNAI: India’s first 3D printed house built by IIT-Madras startup Tvasta was inaugurated on the campus Tuesday
The house, which has a built-up area of 600 square feet, has a bedroom, a hall and a kitchen. The entire house was designed using software and printed using concrete 3D printing technology.

Using this technology, a new house can be built in five days against four or five months in conventional mode. Further, the cost of the house is reduced by around 30% and life of the building can exceed 50 years.
Concrete 3D printing is an automated manufacturing method for constructing three dimensional real-life structures (at all realizable scales). The technique utilizes a concrete 3D printer which accepts a computerized three-dimensional design file from the user and fabricates a 3D structure in a layer-by-layer manner by extruding a specialized type of concrete specifically designed for the purpose.

While inaugurating the first 3D printed house virtually on Tuesday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “India definitely needs such solutions which do not require much time. Conventional housing requires timing, material, logistics, transporting of material, and so on. But if this technology can produce houses in different locales at five days per house, it would not be a big challenge to build 100 million houses by 2022.”

The interior of the house
IIT-Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthi said, “The machine for constructing this house can be rented, like borewells rented by farmers. It provides for large-scale, high quality and also, price assurance for the customers.”
“This technology can enable deep personalization of construction for the individual. It also can ensure that affordable, good quality housing is available to all Indians with a technology that is built in India,” said Adithya VS, Co-founder and chief executive officer, Tvasta.
Besides providing housing, it can also solve problems like sanitation, disaster-time rehabilitation, and projects to construct military bunkers, among others.
The house was developed in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Centre for Innovation in Shelter.