Wood Fiber: The ultimate engineering structural material: any takers?

[Norman Albers]

Properly done, straw bale homes are supposedly enduring; we'll see. One uses a seedless straw, I guess after grain harvest. Of course you put an outer skin on the wall so it should not get wet. The one I know is built on a concrete slab.

[YT2095]

Picrete`s pretty funky as a material too, you could in theory build disposable cargo ships made at either pole, and slap an outboard engine on it, take your stuff to where it has to go, remove the engine and ignore it

 

saves having to make a journey back and having great big metal hulks left over to rust when their past sea worthiness.

[Phi for All]

Picrete`s pretty funky as a material too, you could in theory build disposable cargo ships made at either pole, and slap an outboard engine on it, take your stuff to where it has to go, remove the engine and ignore it

 

saves having to make a journey back and having great big metal hulks left over to rust when their past sea worthiness.

Architects are starting to recycle the big steel containers that cargo ships use for use in modular building. First they had some tests done to determine the structural code ratings on the containers and found they meet or exceed most city and state requirements. Then they cut panels where they need to (without touching the integral load-bearing features), run water and electricity along the walls and then finish with drywall.

 

When all the containers for a structure are complete they ship them on site and then have an engineer with some basic workers lift them with a crane and put them together like Legos. They're sealed together and the mechanical, plumbing and electricity components are connected and voila!, a home or office is born.

[gcol]

The obstacles placed in the path of innovators seem insurmountable.

 

In the building industry, they include:

 

Planning control regulations. (new builds must generally conform to existing street scene).

 

Building control regulations.

 

The bottom line of commercial profit.

 

The stranglehold of standard-trained architects and their standard protective trade bodies.

 

The reluctance of the building trades to depart from their areas of comfortable "expertise".

 

As for straw bale, once having taken prevailing climatic conditions into account, Almost any material could be pressed into service between suitable top-hat and boots (roof and foundations).

[Norman Albers]

I know I've heard of strawbale homes in Ashland, Oregon (nearby) but it turns out I was not correct about the particular house I mentioned. I just talked with that friend and he built with rastraw which is recycled polystyrene with cement. Blocks are 12" wide, and ten feet long! He said he cut off rebar with a torch blowing on a piece, and there was no smoking. His interior is sheetrock, and the outside is plaster. The walls have rebar vertical and horizontal, on ten-foot centers. The upper plate for the roof is wood 2x12", secured with J-bolts, same as to any slab.

[Skye]

Polystyrene foam concrete is good for construction in remote areas. The main components can be prefabricated, they are light so transport is easier, and the construction time on site can be really short.

 

I could see this sort of thing becoming big in the future, centralised mass production of housing. With modern CAD/CAM, robotics, etc., the house designs could be individual, so it wouldn't have the stigma of mass housing currently, where every house looks the same. Instead, design the house, have the robots make it, truck it out and have put up in a day or so. Would save huge amounts of time in housing development.

[Norman Albers]

Yes, Skye, the blocks are rather low mass density, but at ten feet long my friends used a forklift (tractor?) with large "claws". Speaking of rain, they chose this rather than straw because he wanted to build in winter rainy season. The styrofoam is used and shredded, which is satisfying.

[YT2095]

the Chemical aspects of Wood based materials are interesting too, one could easily Distill wood to make Carbon (and thus locking up some Carbon footprint and also use a little to fire the distillery), and then make Plastic polymers from the distillate

 

it`s just an Idea I`m working on, and will hopefully have experimental data later on in the year.