high-strength foam concrete created

[amor de cosmos]

This is cool. It would be great to see what some creative architects & designers would do with this stuff:

Ultraporcrete – a New High-Strength Foam Concrete
13 January 2010 Technische Universitaet Dortmund

Concrete is a modern building material, which is used on nearly every construction site worldwide and which has obtained high acceptance among planners and users, thanks to its varied field of application. Due to its high density, standard concrete only has insufficient heat insulation, which implicates that residential buildings made of concrete need additional heat insulation. The light cellular or foam concretes with a good heat insulation produced to date, are hardened by means of costly and energy-intensive processes under high pressure and high temperature in autoclaves. Or their technical applicability is strongly limited due to their low strength.

The team Prof. Dr. Bernhard Middendorf, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Neisecke and Dr. Armin Just from the Chair of Building Materials at Technische Universität Dortmund had the plan to develop a building material made of concrete, which combines the strength and flexible applicability of standard concrete and the low density and the good heat insulation of cellular and foam concrete. The result of their research: ‘Ultraporcrete’, a high strength, chemically expanded, air hardened construction concrete with excellent heat insulating properties.

‘Ultraporcrete’ is worldwide the first foam concrete with the physical properties allowing to be used as construction material for load bearing building components. Due to the high rate of air voids, the building material also has excellent heat insulating properties. Another advantage of ‘Ultraporcrete’ is the low dead load of just about one third of a comparable structure made of conventional concrete. Above that, the tailor-made adjustment of the air void distribution allows the properties like, for example, compressive strength and density to be flexibly adapted to the requirements of the building object.

“Therefore, ‘Ultraporcrete’ opens up totally new possibilities in concrete engineering. It is also possible to use this building material to produce, for example, economic load bearing roof constructions for which wood is still preferred today due to a variety of reasons”, Middendorf and Just explain.

TU Dortmund applied for a patent for ‘Ultraporcrete’ and the industry is already very interested. Together with the patent marketing agency PROvendis GmbH, the Dortmund scientists expect the building material to be used in numerous innovative building projects.

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem...CultureCode=en

[1ajs]

interesting...

[You Need A Thneed]

This product would be very useful if it could be made to be as strong as concrete. Reducing dead loads in structures would make a lot of things possible that weren't really possible before.

Concrete that insulates while useful in some things, wouldn't be a industry changer. Most concrete in buildings is inside insulated space anyway.

[amor de cosmos]

Originally Posted by You Need A Thneed

This product would be very useful if it could be made to be as strong as concrete. Reducing dead loads in structures would make a lot of things possible that weren't really possible before.

yeah.... a building could be made much taller than burj khalifa if the top half (or something like that) were made out of this lighter foam stuff can we finally build the illinois now?

[scalziand]

Originally Posted by amor de cosmos

yeah.... a building could be made much taller than burj khalifa if the top half (or something like that) were made out of this lighter foam stuff can we finally build the illinois now?

It could help make buildings taller, but not as much as you think. This is because for tall buildings, the wind loads are typically larger than the dead loads. Thus, reducing the dead load wont necessarily reduce the size of the structure required to resist the wind.

[mugzy]

Vertually flame resistent and impermiable as well....