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The UK is currently in the grip of a housing crisis, a recent report from the House of Lords stated that the shortage of affordable housing in Britain could jeopardise our standards of living for future generations. This paper aims to attempts to influence the problem of housing shortage by evaluating the potential of implementing fast building additive manufacturing (BAM) as a construction process. To validate the feasibility of BAM as a building process a variety of compressive and slump tests were conducted to assess the capabilities of concrete paste as a layer-by-layer build material. A structure was fabricated to represent a fused filament fabrication (FFF)-based BAM process; the tests determined that nozzle design limitation, the flowability of concrete and resistance to slump are key material characteristics in constructing house structural elements. Furthermore, the use of recyclable natural and steel wool fibres did not contribute to mixtures compressive strength but did significantly increase its flexural strength.

Additive manufacturing (AM) of metallic products is seen by many to be commercially viable for only small and highly complex components, manufactured with difficult to machine materials using heat sintering process. In the automotive manufacturing sector, metal hard tooling is often required to produce mass produced components, and the tools are typically bespoke, large in size, inflexible and complex. Conventionally these tools have either been machined from solid billets or near-net-shape cast and then machined to achieve final size. Rapid casting technologies (RCT) use AM 3D sand printing process to manufacture sand mould tools used to create the production tooling. Adopters of this technology can achieve an increasingly agile and robust production process, RCT can also rewrite the design hand book for casting design. The research findings demonstrate that RCT can be successfully applied within the automotive industry, achieving considerable cost and time savings whilst improving quality and product flexibility.