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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."
This sounds like the building process from the Jetsons. Maybe now we can move on from the trailer homes, manufactured homes and traditional building and move onto "Ziplock Construction Co."
So, once I get my mother-in-law to go into the building, how do I get the whole thing back into the bag?
cat life | grep joy >> memory
Thousands of refugees adding water and ingesting their "building in a bags" thinking they were MRE's.
If we're just talking about instant structures for specific needs, why not fiberglass? 3M makes a casting material (as in, for setting broken bones) that is fiberglass with a resin that is activated with water and sets very rapidly. Why not use something just like that? You can then spray it with an epoxy to make it watertight. It wouldn't be as rigid as a concrete structure, and you would have to anchor it somehow, but it would also be a whole hell of a lot lighter and easier to customize (by cutting holes in it with any kind of saw before you sprayed epoxy on it.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Finally, I can move out of my parents' basement!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Instant asshole, just add alcohol
Insert witty comment here
An inflatable building to house my inflatable...er...friend.
..Dr. Schlock just got a hard-on...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Yeah, ok, cool for emergencies. But I won't be carrying one on my back anytime soon, cause I'm sure it weight a ton, literally :)
Do they come in multiple flavors, too?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
...to get your cement building to grow a door?
cat life | grep joy >> memory
While the product is innovative and interesting, the comparison (cost-wise) with other "portable" structures is not correct. This looks to be (from the article) a non-portable semi-permanent structure.
BP http://www.card-central.com
Why not dispense with the concrete and just make it inflatable? I doubt the concrete will make it all that much more permanent of a shelter than it would otherwise be. Besides, if it's good enough for space, it's good enough as a temporary shelter. Check out the inflatable space habitats
I've always thought about marketing an empty box that says "Dehydrated water...just add water!"
:)
Hey, if people will pay for water in bottles, who knows
That is my question, how do you get in?
How much do you reckon the instant building would cost if it was manufactured in China?
I am thinking it would be a great way to help poor people in Third World countries have a cheap roof over their heads that is actually high quality. I can imagine a slum in Mumbai filled with thousands of these instant buildings. What are the economics and advantages of an instant building as replacement for flimsy shelters in slums across the world?
The military will be all over this. Think about airdropping an advance team in some clearing, give them 12 hours, and they have a defendable base with concrete walls. Portable bunker. If it could be adapted to making other shapes of concrete surfaces, drop a large number of them, and make a concrete landing strip. Rapid deployment operations and base fortification would have days cut off their time.
Works like a charm.
I've used it to get rid of old car batteries too!
"agencies" maybe, but the military already has a way to erect shelters quickly: lots and lots of man power. Ever watched how quickly soldiers setup and take down a camp?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sorry, but I can't help myself...
The English language has some rules about the correct placement of commas in a sentence. It's not a case of "Instant grammar just, add commas!!!1"
May I take this opportunity to recommend Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" to the author of the above summary?
Oh, and the word you were looking for was F-A-B-R-I-C, fabric; not fabic. Fabic sounds like an eastern-european football player.
</rant>
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Supposedly, the building-in-a-bag won second prize in the Cement Association contest that it was originally designed as an entry for. I'd love to see what the winner came up with....
I would hardly consider '12 hours' to be 'instant.'
One of their first customers will be Wile E Coyote.
:)
Mark my words!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
What also floats in water?
Bread! Apples! Uh, very small rocks!
No thanks. I will stick with bicks and concete.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
Imagine this:
You're in the jungle (US Army) and you're carrying your 500lb base camp on your shoulders. With 30 miles of walking remaining, it starts to rain...
Who the hell cares...you can carry 500lbs!!11
We can take all our valuable water and use it for building little houses!
Better yet, let's just throw thousands of these bags in the ocean and create an underwater city instantaneously!
Who sees the potential for glorious abuse? Just stick it in someone's car, put a hose in, and run like hell.
Does it come with ethernet hookup?
It's a shell that's strong in compression. Pile earth on it, and you've got your sound and thermal insulation. The one issue I can see is the small size; 172 square feet isn't much. You'd need a lot of them for any kind of refugee situation, and at $2100 each (about $12/square foot) it's probably as expensive as local housing in most of the world if not more so.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The goal: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/nhsequence_f .jpg
The model: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/642_f.jpg
Well, the basic form of disposal is probably close to what we do with waste concrete pilings, at the prestressed concrete company where I work. We pile them on the ground near the water, and let them act as landfill that extends our land. No joke. It's not too bad -- as the concrete very slowly decays due to the freeze-thaw cycle, it pretty much doesn't pollute anything. Everything there is also found in natural rock that comes into the ocean with rivers.
However, if that's not good enough for you, you can do as we do with our waste wet concrete. Expose it to acid (muratic acid, for example), and it will break down faster.
But for me?
I rather suspect that this stuff would be good for burying in the ground, covering with dirt, and planting grapevines over it.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The Inuit people have been doing this for thousands of years. Making buildings out of water, that is.
How 'bout making a fan out of WAMU (Washington Mutual)? Now, THEY can have those instant banks and pop them up at lower cost (unless the states and counties charger higher property taxes....)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Just the thing for backpacking in bear country.
Well, except for the weight...
-- Alastair
> 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.
There are whole towns in Michoacan that are built of not much more than sticks. They're not much for privacy, but the breeze goes right through (a must for life in that area). If a Chubasco comes through, you just pick the sticks up, jam them back into the dirt, slap the tin siding back up as your roof, and you've rebuilt your house in a day.
The concrete dwellings down there don't fare nearly as well.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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.
Don't people usually have problems with water during disasters? If you place contaminated water into the structure are you going to have problems?
What about areas where the problem is they have no water? Just some thoughts..
Obama = Socialism.
There is also the issue of wind. I'm sure concrete structures don't blow away as easily, and many disaster areas are going to have lots of wind and water. Plus, concrete doesn't need to dry to set. Apparently it sets up quite nicely underwater.
My father has been building unique houses for about thirty years. One was an earth-covered house ("underground" is a bit misleading, but that's what I would normally call it) and he's been looking into a very modular building material called 3-D Panel which is basically styrofoam between wire meshes. After you assemble the building, using rebar or something to connect wire meshes together, you spray it with shotcrete, and you're done. I mean, if we're allowed to have a spraying apparatus, why not? The specs for this panel system are impressive. They say the insulating value is R-18 to R-33--better than the new homes they throw up these days in my neighborhood.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Sounds pretty useless, unless it is shipped with sterile water, and sterile air to inflate it with. Just shows that the inventors haven't fully thought through their ideas.
> what's wrong with a good old tent?? I can put one
> up in just a few minutes!
Never actually lived in a tent, have you? Do you like dry feet? Not having your home blow away?
> Are these thing sturdier?
Much, much sturdier.
> Lighter?
Much heavier. That's a _plus_.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Bill Moss was one of the founders of Moss tents and the inventor of the modern dome tent. I met him about ten years ago through a guy I worked with.
Anyhow, he showed me this invention he had, it looked like one of those tiny bicycling or backpacking tents, but it was made of cleverly prestressed and folded cardboard. Basically it folded flat, then instantly popped up into a small shelter. It bulged in the middle and had a small hole in one end you crawled through. It wouldn't be much of the shelter, but it could make the difference between freezing to death and surviving. He had designed it to address the problem of homeless people dying of hypothermia on cold nights in the city. You could pile hundreds of them in the back of pickup, and since they were basically cleverly designed cardboard boxes it would cost next to nothing.
In any case, I don't think it ever went into production, possibly becasue it may not have made enough of a difference to be worthwhile. But it was an interesting idea, cleverly executed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
muratic acid
Most geeks will call this hydrochloric acid. BTW: It's spelled muriatic.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
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.
basically, a slum is an aggregation of cheap and above all temporary housing. at USD 2100 (about LKR 210,000 - a LOT of money where i live) per unit the housing is more expensive than most slum dwellers can afford. also i believe there is a high population turnover in slum areas. people come and people go.and the parts are scavenged to make the other slum dwellings better.
further, the land that slums are on become more desirable as the city develops. which gives the impetus for the governments to move people out of the slums and into multi story housing projects (which end up becoming vertical slums, but i digress), thereby reclaiming the land for public use. a cement based housing system would make this process more difficult
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Oh, and under gallery 2004, there is a pdf of the top contenders with discussions of the philosophies behind their works.
Maybe during the Vietnam War era this would have been ideal, but given the current state of affairs, it might work better if they made a "just add sand" concrete structure...
Better yet, let's just throw thousands of these bags in the ocean and create an underwater city instantaneously!
Excess water would probably yield very poor quality concrete and ocean currents would probably wash the concrete away before it set. Also, the baloons would need to be well anchored or they would float to the surface.
Another technique for this (although not as quick) is to just deploy a metal mesh (think window screen size). Then you apply electricity to the mesh and the minerals in sea water acrete onto the structure. This technique was described in article in the Mother Earth News 25 years ago although it apparently wasn't pursued enough. More recently, this technique has been used to restore coral reefs and one group plans to use it to create an underwater habitat .
There is some research at Standford and a Wikipedia entry . Apparently, there is some confusion about how much energy is needed to produce such structures and a structure similar in size to the inflatable one would probably use around $500 worth of electricty.
What happens to the building after its use is over? More trash or leave it for the residents of whereever it is to clean up?
Sounds like something from Tom and Jerry.
Tom eats the house-in-a-bag thinking it's an MRE. A couple of seconds later, he balloons into a massive house-shaped cat (or a catskin house?!)
After a short pause, a chimney pops out of his ear.
Yeah, it has to be a real chimney. This is Tom and Jerry we're talking about here, folks.
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... It's nice to see that eminent scientist Wile E. Coyote, PhD, has finally put the past behind him and is concentrating on real work nowadays.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
From this article:
Janet Ginsberg: how many camps and average size? How long do they last?
Larry Thompson: 10,000 people is an average size. Some have up to 600,000 people. Some camps exist for around 15-20 years. In Palestine some have been there 40-50 years. We tend to put people in camps and forget about them. In Kosovo--UNHCR had plans on orderly return--the refugees all went home in a number of days. The thought is that many Afghans will go home this spring. But, unless there are demonstrated economic incentives to go home, they won't leave.
No. I'm sorry, but I don't think "fabric drenched in cement" gives you reinforced concrete - it gives you concrete, that happens to have fabric inside to save the setup crew from fussing around shaping it.
e d+concrete
The intention of reinforced concrete is that the tensile strength / structure of the piece is actually reinforced by something - http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+reinforc
"Concrete that is strengthened by the insertion of rods of steel, wire mesh or strands of glass reinforced plastic or similar materials."
I agree that you've got more than concrete there, and it would stand up to a beating better than just concrete, but I question using the term "reinforced concrete". Damned generic term that has a specific meaning - my complaint is really more that the term is too loaded I suppose. Oh well.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
I grew up in a brick house on the US East Coast, and brick and stone were fairly popular building materials - or woodframe with brick facing. But out here in California, it's not a useful material, because it doesn't behave well in earthquakes. Too many parts of the world do use brick or stone houses in earthquake country - leading to tens of thousands of deaths when there's a big quake in places like Iran or Armenia. Cement works ok, because you can put lots of rebar in it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks