Steel Additive Construction: New possibilities for efficient structural systems

The digitalization of the construction sector could potentially produce more efficient structures, reduce material waste and increase work safety. Current strategies for the realization of automated steel constructions see the application of metal Additive Manufacturing processes (and in particular Wire-and-Arc Additive Manufacturing, WAAM) as an opportunity to build a new generation of efficient steel structures with reduced material use. This, though, requires advanced multidisciplinary knowledge in manufacturing, metallurgy, structural engineering and computational design. Recent effort has been made in order to combine computational design with current digital fabrication procedures to realize resource-efficient steel structures for the future. The present work aims at providing an integrated design approach to develop resource-efficient structural elements combining computational design algo-rithms with considerations on the WAAM fabrication process, structural performances and verifications. The idea comes from the preliminary results achieved in terms of new structural optimization theories, fabrication of large-scale elements with WAAM and structural verification of first prototypes. The approach is applied to three classes of structural elements (beam, joint and column). The results aim at increasing the application of metal Additive Manufacturing in construction, through the development of a new generation of resource-efficient structural members.