Title: Monitoring and Control of Concrete 3D Printing
Abstract: Quality monitoring and the process control of the printing process with concrete are not given much importance until now. Controlling the flow during printing involves lot of manual trial-and-error. Development of better control mechanisms to monitor the changes in rheological properties to obtain a better-quality output is necessary. The objective of our research is to improve the quality of the concrete 3D printing by continuous monitoring and process control using machine learning and computer vision (CV) techniques. We have developed a methodology to study the extrudability property of concrete by extracting the surface texture of concrete printed layers using computer vision methodologies. Measuring parameters such as the layer thickness in real-time helps to assess its temporal changes. Using these image features in a feedback loop help to make corrective actions in the printing process.
Bio: Dr. Benny Raphael is a professor and the head of the department of Civil Engineering at IIT Madras. He did his BTECH and M.S. in Civil Engineering at IIT Madras and obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He worked at Infosys Technologies Ltd. Bangalore, EPFL Switzerland and NUS Singapore, before joining IIT Madras. He is one of the associate editors of the high impact international journal Automation in Construction. He wrote the books Construction and Building automation (Taylor and Francis, 2022), Fundamentals of Computer Aided Engineering (John Wiley, 2003) and Engineering Informatics (John Wiley, 2013) which are used as textbooks in many Universities. He won the distinguished R&D award from the Minister for National Development (Government of Singapore) in 2011 for innovations in developing the Zero Energy Building at the BCA Academy, Singapore. He has published about 70 papers in peer reviewed international journals and about 60 papers in the proceedings of international conferences. Some of the awards he has won include, Sir J. C. Bose Patent Award (2021), and the best paper award of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering in the years 2008 and 2013. His research interests are in the areas of optimization, concrete 3D printing, BIM, automation, and energy efficient buildings.