An artist’s rendering of one of the manufacturing spaces inside the University of Maine’s “Factory of the Future.” Construction of the $82 million building began last week in Orono. Courtesy Grimshaw Architects

University of Maine researchers have spent the last few years proving they can 3D print just about anything: Pods for growing oysters? Easy. A boat? Sure. A house? No problem.

Now, partners at the UMaine Advanced Structures and Composites Center are expanding their research beyond asking what they can print to how they can print a lot more.

School officials, using the world’s largest 3D printer, want to commercialize their endeavors to tackle issues ranging from climate change to the housing crisis.

And they’ll be able to thanks to a new 50,000-square-foot Green Engineering and Materials building that will house what officials are calling the “Factory of the Future,” a massive 3D printing manufacturing hub and training space.

The University of Maine made a 600-square-foot home using a massive 3D printer in 2022. Now, researchers want to ramp up production. A new, larger printer – and a building to house the technology – is supposed to help them do that.  Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

The factory will have two primary manufacturing bays. The first will be focused on housing, renewable energy and infrastructure, while the other will focus on national defense and boat building. 

The roughly $82 million building is scheduled to open in 2026. Construction began last week.

Habib Dagher, executive director of the composites center, said the factory will help “usher in a new era of digital manufacturing.”

THE NEXT GENERATION OF EQUIPMENT

The university made headlines in 2019 when it broke the Guinness World Record for the largest polymer 3D printer and then later printed both a 600-square-foot house and a 25-foot boat.

Then, just about five years later, in April, the university unveiled a new 3D printer, christened Factory of the Future 1.0, that at 96 feet long by 32 feet wide by 18 feet high, is more than four times larger than its predecessor. It can print up to 500 pounds per hour.

An exterior view of what the new University of Maine green engineering and materials building will look like. It is slated to open in 2026. Rendering courtesy Grimshaw Architects

And yes, the printer and the new factory will share the same name – though technically, the new space will be the Factory of the Future 2.0.

Dagher compared it to the various iterations of the iPhone.

“We’re always making it better, and that’s why we call it the Factory of the Future. It’s been designed to be very flexible, so we can add new equipment. If we knew what equipment would go in there in two years we would be calling it the Factory of the Past,” he said.

Habib Dagher, director of the advanced composites center, center, works with research assistants Ryan Thornton, left, and Mitchell Kelley, at the University of Maine on March 27 in Orono. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

Dagher expects the new building will have an ever bigger 3D printer than the 1.0 – possibly even twice the size.

“We’re working on designing equipment that doesn’t exist yet,” he said. “We are developing the next generation of equipment. When we hired the architectural firm, they asked us, ‘Well, tell us the equipment so we can design the building to support it,’ and I said ‘Well, I’ve got some news for you.'”

The printer will be designed in concert with the building.

An artist’s rendering of a lobby inside the University of Maine “Factory of the Future” being built in Orono. The 50,000-square-foot facility will house two massive 3D printers, and a third, even larger one, being designed in tandem with the building. Courtesy Grimshaw Architects

Aside from the massive 3D printers, the facility will also be outfitted with technology like virtual and augmented reality and drones.

The “bigger and better” attitude for equipment isn’t just for the notoriety of smashing world records. Dagher said it’s critical if the center is going to scale up the production of 3D-printed houses.

3D-PRINTED HOUSES 

The university unveiled the BioHome3D in 2022. The first 3D-printed house made with wood fiber-based polymer, BioHome3D was printed in four modules, then moved to the site and assembled in half a day. Electricity was running within two hours.

The house has successfully weathered two Orono winters so now Dagher said the center will pivot from how to make one house to how to make 1,000. Eventually, he hopes to see 3D-printed neighborhoods or even apartment buildings.

More units will also help keep costs down.

3D printing won’t cut the cost of houses in half, but it will be competitive with traditional construction, Dagher said. The artificial intelligence and digital technology allow them to do more with fewer people, cutting down on labor costs, and the materials are significantly cheaper.

“The materials we are using are waste materials from the sawmills,” he said. “Maine has a number of paper mills that have shut down and that created essentially an abundance of waste material in our sawmills that used to go to the paper mills and doesn’t really have a lot of places to go right now.”

Dagher estimated there are one million tons of waste wood generated per year that could be used for 3D-printed houses instead.

The University of Maine printed its first BioHome3D in 2022 with wood-based polymer. With a larger printer, and an even bigger one on the way, researchers are pivoting from how to make one house to how to make a thousand.  Photo courtesy of University of Maine

Dagher knows 3D printing isn’t the silver bullet to solving the housing crisis, but he believes it can help.

The Factory of the Future won’t be open for at least two more years, so in the meantime, Dagher said he is collaborating with low-income nonprofit Penquis and MaineHousing on a nine-unit 3D-printed development for people in Bangor experiencing homelessness. The houses will be staggered, rather than all nine units built in one go.

“It’s a learning experience. Every time you do it, you do it better. … We don’t want to sit there and wait until the Factory of the Future (is done) and stop learning,” he said.

‘A FACTORY OF PEOPLE’

The Factory of the Future and the possibility of 3D-printed homes have received a lot of interest from developers and builders, Dagher said, because of the ongoing labor shortage. The houses can be put up in a matter of hours. They can even be inspected digitally.

“The issue is really, how do we do more with less people?” he said. “This facility is going to allow us to do that.”

Classroom space inside the UMaine “Factory of the Future.” The building will include technology for virtual and augmented reality in addition to the university’s massive 3D printers. Rendering courtesy Grimshaw Architects

He was careful to note that he’s not interested in replacing jobs, but rather supplementing gaps that already exist in the labor force.

The factory will help train the next generation of workers and hopefully, interest engineering and computing students in the trades too.

Dagher likened the building to a teaching hospital, where students can get hands-on learning experience, work in the lab and earn various credentials.

“We fail if we develop a technology nobody can use. I tell everybody it’s a factory of research and new products, but it’s a factory of people, too,” he said. “If we’re going to commercialize these technologies we need to develop the people.”