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Transparent Concrete
rakerman writes: "The Economist reports in How to see through walls that development is underway on translucent concrete, with hopes of eventually developing transparent concrete. Can transparent aluminium be far behind?"
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Won't translucent structures lead to an increase rate of smack death amongst bird populations?
Well, it's nice to see innovation within the construction sector isn't dead. Even for something that seems so off the wall as transparent (or currently, translucent) concreat can give birth to innovative new designs and possibilities from architechs.
I mean, I can just see a wall done with a bubble effect (with slighly differnt opacities in the aggitates and clear binding coumpound).
Only thing is, once transparent concreate is perfected... how are the mobsers going to get rid of bodies if they can't throw them in the foundation of a new building anymore...
He has visions of cities that glow from within, and buildings whose windows need not be flat, rectangular panes, but can be arbitrary regions of transparency within flowing, curving walls.
That sure sounds remarkably like Apple's philosophy...
They're called windows, and they're usually made of a neat transparent material called glass... ;-)
Seriously, though, any slurry-based material like concrete is most likely to be opaque because microscopic structures tend to scatter light. You only need to pour a glass of milk to see this in action.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I seriously doubt we will ever see transparent aluminum. In order for it to succceed, the atoms would have to be aligned in a crystaline matrix. Such a matrix would likely create a hard, yet weak substance.
It would have much strength, yet it would fracture easily. Its called "Modulus of elasticity"; something certain steels(H11 namely) holds in spades. I doubt even if it could be produced, people would find it of much use.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Can transparent aluminium be far behind?
It's already here, although in the form of an oxide rather than the pure metal.
A little off topic, but germane to the item noted in the summary for this topic.
He refers to transparent aluminum from the Star Trek IV movie. In that film, they risk rewriting history by giving the technology for transparent aluminum to a 20th century factory.
They never answer the basic question of why did the aluminum have to be transparent? Why not regular aluminum or any other such material? Do the whales need a view of the Klingon starship? Do they have no cameras or sensors to let them see the whales?
It made no sense at all but it was a major plot point for the whole film. Sigh. Ok, mod me off topic now.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Can transparent aluminium be far behind?"
Yes, transparent aluminum can be far behind. Metals like aluminum have free electrons which prevent transmission of light.
Bush's education improvements were
Apparently neither The Economist nor Slashdot knows the difference between translucent and transparent. Ugh.
Anyway, this is old news. Metropolis magazine reported on the development of translucent concrete back in April 2001.
would be to legislate that all new residential and commercial dwellings be built from transparent concrete.
Anyone refusing to demolish their existing house would be added to a database of 'potential conspirators'.
This would be quite consistent with recent 'anti-terrorist' surveillance legislation.
Also, the boom in building would boost the flagging economy.
Imagine whole neighbourhoods of people living in complete exposure, proving they're real honest patriotic Americans.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I wouldn't want to live in a transparent house. Think of the lack of privacy. People'd be able to see when I was in the bedroom, when I was in the bathroom... They'd be able to see all my movements.
Think cristalline structure. Think additives (it does not need to be 100% pure). After all, we also have transparent graphite, whereas the usual variant is pitch black ;-)
(For the chemically impaired: that's diamond that I'm talking about, which is almost pure carbon, just as is graphite. And as has been pointed out by another poster, transparent aluminium oxyde already exists, it's a synthetic sapphire.)
Say no to software patents.
although right now it sounds more like Plexi glass or a liquid epoxy of some sort. kudos to the marketing rep who associated it with concrete.
on the other hand, at my old middle school, the school had outgrown it's original gym, and elected to build a second gym away from the main building, made entirely from concrete. I never understood how that thing stood; it was full-sized, housed a cafeteria in one end, and above that was the wrestling mat. to get to the point, it was abysmally dark in there. they had xeon HID lamps or the likes in there, and things were still pretty dim. emergency lights would no doubt have poorly lit it also. making the east and west walls semi-translucent would have significgantly improved lighting conditions.
i wonder if you could put an element in this "concrete" that would block IR light, otherwise I can't see this being implimented in the south or very far north, as it would cause massive heat-loss/absorbsion.
moox. for a new generation.
There is a very big difference between "transparent" and "translucent". The former means that light passes through the material almost completely unchanged (a certain amount of distortion is okay, but the point is that you can make out what's behind it). Translucent means that light is transmitted, but it's diffuse and you can't make out what's behind the material. This concrete is translucent. It's not transparent (read the article).
The real problem with transparent building materials is that people inside want to control the transparency, just look at your own home, you got curtains and shades on all(most) windows.
:)
:)
A classic problem with new hightech buildings (Glass 'n metal) is climate control, its nice to be able to look outside, but if the sun is starring you right back its not that fun. So you tint the windows
The next problem is that in those buildings the light that gets through is not white light (sunlight) anymore, and working in that kind of buildings can cause depressions very similary to winter depressions.
Remember: Architects are just building nerds
Can material described in the article really be called "concrete"?
As it is written there its only resemblance to concrete is that it consists of coarse aggregate, fine aggregate and binding agent. But this is not a recipe for concrete only - also for other materials. Also, Dr. Price's secret material can't be poured or produced on site - one the main reasons of traditional concrete popularity. It would probably find its use in form of blocks of translucent material, that could be used to enhance possibilities for architects but what Dr. Price is trying to do is another building material, which is very interesting indeed but can hardly be called "concrete".
Buildings glowing from within? This is terrible for astronomers... the added light pollution would further ruin the viewing conditions for many great observatories.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
After all, most of us are reading this through a good chunk of transparent mixture of lead and sand! Yes, good quality glass used for CRT displays...
In Murphy We Turst
It has been my understanding that all metals must be the color they are, because of the way electrons swim around in the metal meta-crystal, and the way they interact with hitting photons.
If this understanding of mine is correct, transparent aluminium (or any other metal reinforcement) is not likely to happen, but some sort of plastic may do the trick.
What I find most amazing is he models the molecules on like a Mac Plus, if I remember right (haven't seen it since it came out)...
Imagine what he coulda done w/a g4. You say "Hello, Computer" and it actually listens!
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yes you did miss the joke. Go watch Star Trek IV, this will give you the cultural reference to 'get' the joke.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
If you lived in a transparent concrete house would you still have to refrain from stone throwing?
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The comment about aluminium is a reference to Star Trek.
First we had clear Pespi.
Then we had clear deodorant.
Saturday Night introduced us to clear gravvy.
Like clear concrete was that far behind?
Architect "...are the stairs, and this is where the wi..."
Programmer "NO! NO! I will not have windows installed!"
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I have to agree here -- I don't think that crystalline structure alone will confer transparency on a material, especially metal. It has firstly to do with the properties of the atoms and molecules themselves, and maybe second the crystalline nature.
Why, then, would glass be transparent? Glass has a most uncrystalline structure!
..the mafia will have to find other places to bury people like Jimmy Hoffa!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
But then again, "Glass Slippers" sounds so much better than "Concrete Overshoes".
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
and buildings whose windows need not be flat, rectangular panes, but can be arbitrary regions of transparency within flowing, curving walls.
Sorry, but that is already possible.
A researcher at the university of Delft has developed a way to create twisted glass allowing for twisted buildings.
A dutch article can be found here. Take a look at the images if you don't understand the text
"We live in our minds, and existance is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality" Ayn Rand
On the upside, if anyone tries it, my curiosity as to what such a corpse looks like after a few years will no doubt be satisfied.
The explanation on how to achieve this reads a bit funny.
It seems to assume that if one mixes two transparent
components (e.g. glass grid, and some transparant matrix), the result is also transparent.
This is not true, as every high school boy that studied optics can tell you. Refraction index, surface properties etc.
It will probably be pretty hard to make a transparant material from two components, let alone keep the other properties of concrete.
The article mentions that the doctor wants the material to be able to recycle. The author comments that this might be a "tall order".
This tells me they must be using some VERY uncommon bonding agent. They do mention the use of glass, which is a sand product anyway, being used.
It's hard to imagine why they couldn't recycle this stuff like they recycle concrete now. It makes me even more curious as to what their formula is.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
coarse aggregate - dried fruit
fine aggregate - flour
binding agent - eggs.
It proved so popular, it's got its own name - cake!
Let's face it, Marie Antoinette would've looked a bit of a dork saying "let them eat edible concrete."
Edible concrete has been with us for years:
coarse aggregate - dried fruit
fine aggregate - flour
binding agent - eggs.
It proved so popular, it's got its own name - cake!
Let's face it, Marie Antoinette would've looked a bit of a dork saying "let them eat edible concrete."
I haven't any real mod points, but this AC post deserves notice in the context.
-- MarkusQ
this april 2001 edition of Metropolis has a pretty informative article on the man and his background.
interesting that i live in houston (concrete captial next to LA) and never have read an article on this guy.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I think by either Marvin or Pella. I've seen promotional materials, and IIRC it was a kind of transparent LCD panel that could be opaqued or made mostly transparent. The downside is that I believe it took power to keep the window transparent, and it was really expensive.
Either way, modern windows, according to my wife who used to work with Andersen Windows, have a higher R factor than a lot of walls -- triple glazing, low emissivity coatings, and krpton/argon filled voids go a long way.
No, really!
If high quality displays can be made inexpensively, of flexible material, and incorporate light sensors (presumably not overwhelmed with photons emanating from the display), would it not be possible to use them as wall paper on the inside and out and thereby achieve the illusion of transparency?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You'll be rich beyond the dreams of Avarice!
Just imagine what Steve Jobs would do with his iMac cases...
Don't quote me on this.
I've calculated a possible material to use for the binding agent, that's a no brainer: Silicone (as it can be formulated for varying degrees of clarity and density)or fiberglas epoxy resins (the added bonus of this is fairly rapid curing...
However, the ecological impact is a far better thing to consider... For example, recycled bottle glass can be ground down to make both aggregate and filler (you can seperate the colored glass and use that to add a touch of color to the finished product), and ground further down, it can act as filler as well...
Considering that the majority of states in the US only have voluntary glass recycling, it might provide incentive for deposit glass bottles, not to mention finally provide a real incentive to recycle old CRT's...
Or if you're feeling daring, you can use the same optical quality sand they use for reflective road striping to give the concrete an almost luminescent quality... For added strength, use polycarbonate rods or strips in a woven lattice...
The article stated that transparent/translucent concrete can only be prepared offsite, but in theory it can be done the same way as existing concrete, just bring a lot of drums of resin or silicone to the site...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
That's going to be the next headline. They'll design something like the Jacob Javits Center, and then we'll see transparent floors, and next thing you know, all the execs get sued for sexual harrasment because their secretaries all had offices on the floor above them, not next to them. And for some reason they had to wear skirts...go figure.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
-Legion
The reason you will never see transparent aluminum is not because of a lack of crystalline structure...
The real reason you will never see transparent aluminum is because it is, well, transparent.
My mistake--it wasn't Michael, but the contributor who thought he was being clever.
-Legion
I would be willing to stretch the definition to include this new material... IF it is also structural.
Hm, tastes like concrete.
Hm, feels like concrete.
Hm, The way this bridge is wobbling makes me think maybe it's not real concrete.
I'm sure the moderator just slipped, and meant +1, funny instead of -1 offtopic. How come I never see these guys in meta-mod?
We need some kind of catchphrase for moderation like this. Humorless Nazi Moderator or something. Then we can reply to posts like this with "HMN Alert" or "Dude, ignore the HMN, I thought it was funny."
Liberty uber alles.
Don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments yet, but after reading the article, the first thing that concerned me is that the nice thing about a concrete building is that it will hold together when it catches fire, not melt, puddle, and add to the blaze with choking poisonous smoke.
Hopefully the designer is taking into account other properties besides strength.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
It might be possible the take a bunch of really thin threads of aluminum and weave them into a mat, which you then embed into a matrix of pale sapphire. Perhaps the metalic threads would enhance the flexibility of the sapphire, while still being thin enough to allow for transparency. The problem that occurs to me is that I believe that sapphire usually solidifies at a higher temperature than aluminum. So keeping the mat intact might be a real challenge.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"We" by Yvegeny Zamyatin, written in 1927, is a precursor of Orwell's 1984. It's a classic dystopic novel, which features, among other things, transparent dwellings for exactly the purpose you suggest.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Glass houses that are golf-ball resistant.
And tornado resistant.
Heck, even crowbar resistant. That's right Milo, keep whacking on that window, we'll get in eventually!
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
It's the year 2000 and I was promised flying cars!!!
********************
I object to Intellect without Discipline.
It's a conspiracy I tell you!!!
Microsoft have been developing transparent concrete for a while now..
fine aggregate = Windows CE
course aggregate = Windows ME
binding agent = Windows NT
Mix them all together and you get
Microsoft CE-ME-NT
That's just untrue, glass IS a solid, which happens to have some property of liquids. Proof? It can be melted!
Now there are materials that are almost impossible to classify, I don't remember the name, but it looks like clay, but is hard when you touch it, and breaks when you try to fold it. However, if you leave for a couple hours on a table, it will flow like goo.
Have you ever looked at concrete? Its filled with lots of air pockets. It's like the fractal sphere packing problem.
The problem is agravated by the material itself. As concrete cures it generates gas. most of it never reaches the surface to disapate. Therefore; causing voids to apear in the final material. Vibrating the concrete before it's fully cured helps but is never perfect.
Even if you used rosin as the glue and glas beads as the aggregate, you would still have bubbles. As any POVRAY user would tell you you can never get a perfect merge like that in real life.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
The joke was in Star Trek IV. They had time-travelled to the present day and were trying to build something, and were wondering what materials the primitive present-day Earth had. One character (?who?) said "what about transparent aluminium" and the other (scotty?) said "they don't even have *that* yet".
My guess is that it's a liquid crystal panel. It might also be possible to make a electrochromic material that turns light and opaque as well as dark and opaque.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I don't think "Why was the tank transparent??" is on the same level as "How can a Macintosh computer talk to an alien computer, give it a virus, and disrupt the defensive shields on every single alien ship attacking?"
The truth is, I don't think "why does this need to be transparent?" was much of a plot point. They needed materials to build a tank, and plexi-glass suited their needs. It really doesn't need to be more complex than that. I don't think anybody was on the edge of their seats going "Why do they need plexi-glass!?!?!? Yeesh, what a crappy movie.".
This type of detail sounds more like you were fishing for an inconsistency in the movie so you could make yourself look more observant. It seems like everybody nowadays is looking for flaws in movies so they can appear smarter to everybody else. The problem with doing this is that you ruin the movie for youself. What's embarrasing is that both Star Trek and Star Wars fans do this alot.
One of my favorite examples of these ludicrous debates is "Turbo Lasers aren't lasers! They don't act like lasers, they can't be lasers!" I actually watched a forum grow out of control over this topic about Star Wars. People got upset! There was name calling and everything. This type of behaviour makes people say "Damn dudes, get a life!!". This makes me afraid to admit I like any of these shows/movies for fear that I might get grouped along with these people.
It's fun to have discussions about it, but to get heated about it is absurd.
Anyway, it's not my intention to flame you, btempleton. I just thought it'd be right of me to bring to your attention the way I interpreted your post.
"Derp de derp."
The tanks, as I said, are not the plot point. In fact they have no real need for them.
The plot point is the time they spend hunting around for money and other means to get the tanks. Kirk sells his glasses and Scott hands over a major new piece of chemistry.
That's the part that was bogus. They didn't need transparent tanks. And frankly, I'm amazed the Klingons didn't have a waterproof hold anyway, or one that could be made waterproof enough for the trip. But if they didn't, they would have affected the past far less by just transporting plates from a yard, stealing though it would be. They just wanted to have a cute scene where Scott tries to talk to a mouse.
(And yet somehow is able to then handle a molecular modelling package like a master.)
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Indeed. But one of the reasons people read science fiction, and go to SF movies, is because they like seeing an interesting and coherent imagined world presented. And sure, Star Trek could do a far better job at it, but back in 1967, it was actually way ahead of most of the other media SF, so it got its fans.
This is not just SF. With a mystery, the clues and resolution need to be consistent or the viewers will be annoyed. You can't tell them it's just a story.
So it is just a movie, but viewers want it to be a better movie, so when it does something stupid, something not just outside of the rules of its own imagined world but outside the rules of reason, expect people to be annoyed, even if it's just a movie.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Site is short on information, but it appears this is a mineral/polymer composite, and unfortunately, one that isn't transparent.
Don't know what minerals they are using. Wonder if they could use silicates...
For that matter, the transparent columns, any reason the aggregates couldn't be glass? I think glass would even be cheaper to produce in mass quantities.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'