MONTICELLO — Monticello will soon be home to the largest 3D-printed building in the Midwest.
At least that’s what Nathan Lilly, founder of LX 3D Concrete Printing, plans to make happen, and he’s only just getting started.
His company uses a large-scale 3D-printing machine equipped with a patented nozzle and custom concrete recipe to print buildings that Lilly said are more resistant to flood, mold, fires and tornadoes than structures made out of typical materials.
The buildings are also more energy- and cost-efficient, and require significantly less time to construct. The printer can lay down 10 inches of concrete a second, so the walls of a 2,000-square-foot building can be built in less than 20 hours.
The method, Lilly said, carries the potential to revolutionize housing to become more affordable, durable and less supply-chain dependent.
“We’re really making a structure that would be prohibitively expensive to compete with if it was truly in wood,” Lilly said.“Here’s an easy way to explain it. There’s a book called ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ right? We’re on house number two and we’re changing it to house number three.”
Lilly printed his first building, a 1,500-square-foot structure in Monticello, last fall. He said he’s now only waiting on permits to be approved before he starts printing an 8,000-square-foot combination-industrial-office building this spring that he plans to later lease.
Born in central Illinois, Lilly said he worked in real-estate investment and development — most recently as the chief financial officer for the student housing company JSM Living in Champaign — before he started LX two and a half years ago.
The idea started, in part, after his parent company, Lilly Capital, a private-investment firm, began looking at acquiring a chain of local hardware stores.
But a team member posited that hardware stores would probably be put out of business, Lilly said, if a shop could print whatever part a customer needs right then and there and not have to carry inventory.
Lilly said he then decided to look into printer technology and acquired a $1 million concrete printer from the Danish company Cobod. The machine can print 25-foot-tall walls without being moved.
Though the machine runs with typical-grade concrete, Lilly said he tinkered with the ratio of its ingredients and developed a special nozzle to allow the machine to print buildings that look like they’ve been constructed using traditional methods.
A common critique of concrete construction is that cement requires high heat and a large carbon footprint in order to bind to local aggregates. Lilly said he’s conducted tests with more environmentally sustainable alternatives, but those alternatives have not been structurally approved yet.
“The printer is really just a delivery vehicle,” Lilly said. “So it’s very easy for us to adapt and change to any material design improvements, whether it’s fly-ash or some alternative that dramatically reduces the carbon footprint of actual cement.”
Further, the construction of 3D-printed buildings nets less waste because the company only manufactures what materials they need from a mixer on-site, Lilly said. And concrete buildings can last much longer than structures made primarily of wood or plastic.
Lilly’s number one goal in starting LX was to create homes, but he added that it would be foolish to restrict the company to only use. That’s because printing technology has the potential to create other concrete items more efficiently, like concrete tubes for city utilities.
For example, Lily said he already scoped plans to mass-produce a three-year’s supply of lids for a septic tank company in one day.
“Initially, we were just planning to subcontract for larger volume home buildings, but we kind of realized that the only way to add value to the most people possible is to not turn people down,” Lilly said.
“Really, if anyone wants a structure built, we’re certainly going to be open to it. Our goal is to invest really heavily into the space and shelter the whole world if we can — at least the Midwest.”