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Digital Concrete 2020: A Digital Conference

Digital Concrete 2020 Logo I will be honest. I was disappointed when TU Eindhoven decided to shift “Digital Concrete 2020” , the 2nd RILEM International Conference on Concrete and Digital Fabrication, fully online due to COVID-19. Even before the acceptance of the paper that I submitted to the conference in January, I reserved myself a room in one of the cheapest hotels close to the university, scrolled through TripAdvisor for summer travel plans, check transport to Amsterdam and Paris via Eindhoven, and had already Insta-messaged a friend who lives in Brussels for a catch-up. I was one of those selfish covidiots who was disappointed with the change of conduct medium. But the organizers made the right choice! Organizing a conference must be a hectic process, I have no idea. In Swinburne, we organized 3D Construction Printing conference in November 2018, but I was a newbie at that time and had little involvement until the very last moment. Nevertheless, shifting a conference online,
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My First Journal Article

Labmates and the Bench Prototype Since the beginning of my PhD, I have been getting questions in different forms, all asking about one thing. What the heck am I doing? “Ok Arun, we get you. Concrete 3D Printing. You show us some pictures. But what do YOU do?” From a casual friend just checking on me after years to the review panel members evaluating the originality of my work, to all of them, now I have a good answer. After more than one year of work, six months of writing/editing and around six months of waiting, my first first-authored journal article was published this month. Obviously, this is a happy moment, once for the life, so let me blog it. My work on Concrete 3D Printing focuses on systematically developing Ultra-High Performance Concrete for Digital Construction purposes. Oh jargons; jargons… Let me explain Ultra-High Performance Concrete, or we call it U-H-P-C, is a new generation concrete composite with compressive strength above 150 MPa; That is around 3-4 ti

3D Concrete Printing – a Preview

3D Concrete Printing at the Digital Construction Lab at Swinburne University of Technology “There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.” - Antonio Gaudi Gaudi is also a man of his words and goes down in the history as one of the finest architects ever lived. His quote is also true from the design point of view – rectilinear structures suffer from stress concentration at their corners unlike curvilinear structures. Then why do we have rectilinear structures everywhere?  It offers more nooks to play hide and seek.  But seriously? Concrete, at the time of placing, is a semi-fluid material before it hardens to hold shape. Hence it is flowable, a system of formwork should be installed to define placement positions. And believe me, the formworks – conventionally made of wood – are less flexible, hard to customize to user-desired shape and almost always end up in waste. Formwork has also contribute