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Instant Buildings - Just Add Water
lawrencekhoo writes "Wired has an article about the newly invented
Building in a Bag. The structure is made from cement impregnated fabic, that is sealed in an easily transportable plastic bag. You literally just add water, and then inflate. Twelve hours later, you have a ready to use building. Possible uses include shelter for disaster areas, and instant field hospitals."
According to the article somewhere around 500 lbs actually. Not bad at all!
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Would make a good mother-in-law house, though - what better way to "cement" a relationship than with a load of flammable epoxy ...
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Hard-shelled structures created from inflatable templates are actually quite common. Usually, they are made by spraying concrete or polymer onto the inflatable shell. Alternatively, you first pour on the concrete, then inflate (it takes fairly little pressure to do so). The lining is some combination of fabric and water/air-proof plastic. Some of the templates are reusable, others become part of the structure.
Have a look at Domtec and Binishells.
Wood doesn't turn into a burning hot polymer liquid napalm...
This should be easy. The building is made of three components: an inner airtight layer, cloth, and concrete in the cloth. To make a door, you'd just have a section in which the inner layer wasn't covered by the cloth and concrete. You'd still be able to inflate the building, and when the concrete set you could cut through the uncovered inner layer with a knife to make a doorway.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The goal: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/nhsequence_f .jpg
The model: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/642_f.jpg
Concrete just happens to be very effective at handling compressive loads, and when reinforced with steel rebar or the like, can handle tensile loads in a reasonable manner as well. This is probably the reason that cement is used in lieu of epoxies and other plastics - it has better load-bearing characteristics under compression.
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> Well, they're unreinforced concrete.
It's reinforced by the fabric. In any case if properly designed and erected the load will be entirely compressional.
> I wonder what the next step will be - taking
> advantage of local aggregate as well, so that
> you only have to have cement in the bag?
You don't use aggregate for this sort of thing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Uh yeah, or maybe some random guy on the internet who has never actually laid eyes on the thing isn't the leading expert in how it works. I'm just, you know, tossing that out there. No offense, I'm just saying..
It's fabric drenched in cement. I don't know how much cement you've laid, but I've laid quite a lot. Reinforced concrete is a modern marvel - literally. I believe The Discovery Channel has an episode of Modern Marvels specifically about concrete.
By the way, which weighs more, 500 lbs. of feathers or 500 lbs. of lead? Guess how much a 98 lb. bag of concrete weighs. Guess how much that 98 lbs. of concrete weighs after you use it to impregnate a piece of fabric? I'll answer the next one myself: What do you call a piece of fabric impregnated with 98 lbs. of concrete? Reinforced concrete.
So my take on this is that they're making a very thin shell of concrete, much like you're traditional paper mache, except far more durable. It probably wouldn't survive the erosion of a few heavy rains, but if you crashed a car into it, it would crumple but not be demolished.
I KNOW that somewhere I've seen someone else constructing buildings with this inflation method but I can't recall where. Maybe it was grain storage sheds or something. Anyway, reinforced concrete is truly remarkable - if this stuff made a shell 1/4" thick, you could bust it up with a hammer or a baseball bat but it would take you all day to actually tear the thing down. The cool thing about reinforced concrete is that it doesn't really matter if you crack it. You end up with two pieces of concrete that are bonded by the reinforcement so tightly that the crack is inconsequential. Adjust that concept for 1000 cracks or thin sheets of concrete, but the principle still holds.
If you live near Chicago check out thisx hib.htm
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibits/housing_tempe
I know parent is modded funny, but I wondered the same thing. From the British Cement Association site:
First prize of £3,000 went to Il Hoon Roh for his reinforced concrete organic modular system that impressed the judges for its visually exciting construction potential. The second prize of £2,000 was awarded to Peter Brewin and Will Crawford for their joint entry of portable emergency concrete tents. The humanitarian potential of this entry was very evident. Phoebe Cummings and Stine Vesperson were awarded the third prize of £1,000 for their delicate pieces that combined lace with concrete. The effect gave concrete, usually seen to be a robust material, a more soft and fragile character.
Mark West at the University of Manitoba has created a department specializing in applications of flexible fabric formworks in architecture. Here's an excerpt:
The natural tension geometries given by formwork fabrics simplify the production of lightweight, high efficiency structural shapes. The formworks themselves are extraordinarily light and very inexpensive. The flexibility of a fabric formwork membrane makes it possible to produce a multitude of architectural and structural designs from a single, reusable mold. The use of permeable formwork membrane fabrics produces improved surface finishes and strength as a result of a filtering action allowing air bubbles and excess mix water to bleed through the formwork membrane.
I saw examples at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. last summer and was impressed by the smooth finish of the cement surfaces and also the potential to create very elaborate, beautiful and sturdy structures using really really cheap fabric casings. These new approaches to housing construction are not trivial.
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Most geeks will call this hydrochloric acid. BTW: It's spelled muriatic.
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I don't think so.
Check out housing in Japan sometime. People important Canadian lumber and build western style dry-wall-on-wooden-frame, and it comes out costing less than the prefab.
And, having lived in prefab over here for over ten years, I'm not impressed with the quality. It's like living in a giant plastic butter dish.
Some people like it that way, because when the kids fall, plastic can be somewhat softer than wood. Or something. I dunno.
Your observation is right, but the reason is different. When a thick beam starts to burn, the charcoal that forms itself on the outside will start to protect the inner wood from burning, as soon as it is more then 5 cm / 2 inches thich. Charcoal is funny enough a fire retardent.
As an example, in most (probably all) countries, steel structures must be protected against fire, which is normally done with plaster, concrete, etc. However, at least in Holland, the building code allows you to wrap the steel in 5 or more cm of wood instead.
So back to your 75+ year old house. What protects those beams against the fire is the fact that the pieces of wood used are much thicker than the current 2x6 studs. Or the current "construction beams" that are just strips of plywood with some wood laminated at the ends.
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Oh, and under gallery 2004, there is a pdf of the top contenders with discussions of the philosophies behind their works.