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MIT researchers have 3D-printed and load-tested a 2.3-meter concrete bridge using a computational framework that bakes a printer’s physical limitations directly into the design process, and the results revealed a surprise: today’s printing hardware, not the strength of concrete, determines how efficient a structure can be.
The team, from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, developed the framework to close a stubborn gap in the field. Engineers use topology optimization to find the strongest structure that uses the least material, but those mathematically ideal designs don’t account for what large-scale concrete printers can actually do — their thick nozzles, limited turning radius, and requirement to print in a single continuous motion. The new approach folds all thre