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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.
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
That is my question, how do you get in?
Would make a good mother-in-law house, though - what better way to "cement" a relationship than with a load of flammable epoxy ...
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?
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....
One of their first customers will be Wile E Coyote.
:)
Mark my words!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
yeah this would work great for a Middle-East or an African deployment where military operations are most likely to take place and where water is plentiful. I guess the soldiers could all drink a boat load of water and just piss in the thing when they arrive.
What also floats in water?
Bread! Apples! Uh, very small rocks!
This also means we're one step closer to the fast building of today's :)
real-time strategy games
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
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
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.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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.
Also, when wood is under compression, it's a LOT harder to ignite. Take a look at any older (+75 years) building after a fire - the wood main beams will be charred, but probably not burnt through, whereas steel beams would have buckled under the heat.
Also, when fibreglass resin burns, the resulting fumes are more toxic.
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
> 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.
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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