The Prospects of a Small-Block House Building within the Concept of the Automated Structure Construction of Residential Buildings

This article represents conceptual research of the issues of automation of wall construction of multistoried buildings. Initially, the authors of the article reviewed key issues arising at realization of layer-by-layer wall construction method using building printers (so-called contour construction). According to the authors, the specified problems make significant limitations in the further development of contour construction method, since they have no simple solutions within this method. In other words, the method doesn't allow to solve some specific technological issues related to the field of structural design. Authors proposed a concept of the automated small-block construction method, which allows to solve the listed issues, and also to reduce quantity of technological steps made directly on the building site. The concept borrows some practices of the existing contour construction methods (in particular, use of portal printers), by keeping unchanged the principle of small-block wall construction method. Thus the automation of the building of the walls concerns precisely the processes of preparation, delivery, and installation of small blocks in their specified position, and the associated technological processes (like wall decoration or channel making) decide due to complication of wall blocks structure. The authors of the article consider that the proposed small-block construction method will allow to optimize and accelerate processes of structure construction of residential buildings.