Recent Advances in 3D-Printed Concrete: Materials, Processing, Reinforcement, and Digital Optimization

Dear Colleagues,

The development of additive manufacturing in construction, especially 3D-printed concrete, is revolutionizing the construction design and development of infrastructure and building elements. This Special Issue is focused on outlining the recent developments in materials, processing technologies, and data-driven strategies that can enable reliable and scalable additive manufacturing in concrete.

The Special Issue will target the advances in the optimization of mix design such as the incorporation of supplementary cementitious materials, nano materials, chemical admixtures and eco-friendly constituents to enhance the performance of 3D printable cementitious materials. Special emphasis will be placed on the fresh properties and rheological behavior of mixtures including yield stress, plastic viscosity, pumpability, and extrudability, which are critically important to the stability and flow of materials in printing process. Printability and process performance, such as extrudability, buildability, shape stability, and interlayer bonding are also of great significance and directly affect geometric accuracy and structural integrity of printed elements.

In addition, contributions related to the mechanical and durability behavior of 3D-printed concrete, such as compressive strength, flexural strength, tensile behavior, crack resistance and durability, are also encouraged. The Special Issue will also address the reinforcement strategies such fiber reinforcement and other hybrid reinforcement techniques, to enhance the structural performance of the 3D-printed concrete. Moreover, design of experiments (DOE), machine learning, artificial intelligence and other data-driven mix optimization strategies are highly encouraged.

We invite researchers and practitioners to contribute their insights and findings to this Special Issue to address the critical challenges and research gaps in the emerging field of 3D-printed concrete to pave a way for the larger-scale application of this technology.

Dr. Muhammad Saeed Zafar
Dr. Muhammad Noman
Dr. Siham S. Al Shanti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.