About 1 in 15 people in the U.S. live in manufactured homes, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And many of these communities lack access to shelter during extreme weather events. 

Researchers at Kansas State University have turned to 3D-printed concrete shelters to see if the emerging technology can help these people stay safe. 

Reese Greenlee is an assistant professor of architecture at KSU’s College of Architecture, Planning & Design. His work has set out to determine whether or not 3D-printed concrete structures, manufactured offsite, can lead to more affordable, adaptable and code-compliant storm shelters

Greenlee said 3D-printed concrete is often just used as an outer shell, with another structural system embedded within it. His goal is to find out what it takes to make 3D-printed concrete a more viable structural system through the particular concrete mixture, printing process and geometry.

The process builds shelters layer by layer. The concrete has to be just right, liquidy enough to be pumped and extruded, but also stable enough to maintain its shape and support the layers above it.

Greenlee is working on a single full-size, 4-by-4-foot module building block. It's small, because he doesn't have a bigger printer. But the idea is that he can build pieces off-site in a controlled environment, ship them to a site and assemble them there. It's a bit of a departure for the 3D-printed construction industry which promotes on-site printing as a differentiator. 

Greenlee is also testing whether print orientation, infill and geometry can improve performance under extreme wind pressure and debris impact.

Storm shelters have to take quite the beating, surviving impacts like a two-by-four traveling at 100 mph.

Next, Greenlee and his team will take his shelters to an Intertek testing facility in Minnesota, where the full-scale module will undergo testing at tornado wind speeds.

Greenlee said his work is important because manufactured housing and the communities that live in it have typically received little architectural attention.

“It is a substantial portion of the population that has essentially been overlooked,” Greenlee said.

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