Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing in Civil Engineering, Concrete Technology

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thorsten Stengel

In the field of additive manufacturing, the focus of research is on the development of new mineral-based printing materials using raw materials that are as regionally readily available as possible and the implementation of the new manufacturing technology in construction practice. In addition, the improvement of material properties and the increase of material functionality is the subject of the research work. Here, for example, the insulating effect of the 3D printing materials is optimized. The research covers both deposition processes (extrusion) and particle bed printing.

The research area of concrete technology includes, among others, the topics of low-clinker cements, alternative SCMs, durability of concrete for infrastructure structures, UHPC, composite behavior, restraint stresses/ cracking tendency of concrete, and FE modeling of concrete components (thermal and thermo-mechanical simulation taking into account time/maturity-dependent concrete properties incl. viscoelasticity).

Prof. Stengel also deals with the life cycle assessment of mineral building materials. Specific current research topics include:

• performance of fly ash with respect to workability and durability of concrete.
• development of alternative SCMs for concrete
• rapid test for determining the chloride penetration resistance of concrete
• development of 3D printing materials using coarse natural, lightweight and recycled aggregate
• life cycle assessment of concrete and concrete with recycled aggregate (linear and circular economic system) considering different transport processes
• application limits of TIP (thermal integrity profiling) for the quality control of bored piles in special foundation engineering.