Can't read the article.
How energy efficient and environmentally friendly is the hardening process compared to making steel? And is it a "in 20 years" thing again, like all new battery tech?
A desalination plant can be run when the sun is out and the end product (clean water) can be stored and used. In this instance, the hardening step stores energy in the final product. Just run that step at the right time.
Except, of course, cryptocurrency isn't nearly as useful as, say, desalinated water.
Heresy!!
I'd like to expand on this a bit.
The major problem with cryptocurrency is that the value of a typical coin seems to be ~ the cost of electricity needed to mine one.
This means that a crypto miner turns $1 of energy into ~$1 of wealth.
As far as business plans go, this is an absolutely horrific use of energy. Nearly no other business produces so little wealth, for such a high energy input.
The economy in general, by the way, turns $1 of energy into ~$17 of wealth. [1]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36754#:~:tex....
Everyone who buys the coins are just helping to remove the pandemic stimulus from the economy, which I suppose is its own sort of good.
It's useful to think of industry as a three factor limitation of energy, materials and intelligence[1] -- you are sort of always limited by one of them. If energy was of literal no concern, we could promptly utilize very inefficient carbon capture or even synthesize elements. Solar energy still has significant costs in labor (what I call intelligence) and materials, both of which are finite. We will always as a civilization be managing those factors, even with a seemingly unlimited source like a feasible fusion reactor (which would require an advanced highly costly and finite reactor to produce energy) to solar panels (which outsource the fusion to some 150 million km away producer :) )
A quick googling gives me about 24 MJ/kg for steel production. A compression cycle with, for example, 1cm of displacement would need to exert 2.4 GN or about 24 million tons of kg-force over a 1kg sample to use equivalent energy, which I believe is far above any press in existence.
[1] Indeed we know the first two are equivalent via E=mc^2 , however this conversion constant is essentially prohibitive outside of stellar nucleus. We also know the third one, intelligence, can be built from raw materials and energy, so there's also a conversion factor there.
Executive summary of its qualities:
- Stronger and lighter than concrete. Think thinner floors and walls but with similar strength and load-bearing capability; less tonnes of material to move around. That alone is a big advantage.
- Several buildings across the world already exist; more are being planned. So, its beyond the proof of concept stage but still early days in terms of adoption.
- A few ambitious skyscrapers are being planned that will be built using it. So, instead of steel and concrete, these would be mostly made out of wood. Needless to say these will be very prestigious buildings; which should count as an advantage as well.
- While it uses glue, it's not nearly as much as e.g. MDF; in the order of a few percent. It's mostly wood basically. The cross lamination is what gives it its strength. E.g. toxicity associated with MDF and similar materials is not much of a concern.
- It's quite safe from e.g. a fire safety point of view and should also be usable in e.g. earthquake zones like Tokyo (which has a 350 CLT building planned). It's also quite durable (e.g. rot & humidity).
- It's a nice way to capture carbon, obviously. As opposed to dumping massive amounts of carbon needed for e.g. concrete production and transport. So, very environmentally friendly. Also after demolition (it's wood basically).
- You can work it using traditional wood working tools. Hammers, nails, saws, etc.
- You can do a lot of this offsite as well and ship prefab components to the construction site. So, there is less waste on site of material that needs to be removed after. Existing construction work involves extensive use of power tools and produces enormous amounts of waste.
- As a side effect of that: faster & more efficient construction. This is a big plus point as construction sites in busy cities are very disruptive.
- Short term its somewhat more expensive than traditional construction methods (concrete). But long term there is plenty of potential for cost reductions due to scaling, learning effects, etc. Large scale CLT production simply does not yet exist.
- The wood needed to produce it could feasibly be produced using sustainable foresting. But obviously that would be a sector that would need to be scaled up. However, if done right, that in itself is a good thing. It would basically mean countries investing in sustainable forestry, which has all sorts of nice side effects in terms of carbon capture, nature, and jobs.
The biggest hurdles are not so much technical feasibility but just changing an industry used to a particular way of working along with its supply chains to work in different ways using different supply chains. That kind of thing does not happen overnight. But with the advantages listed above, there is plenty of interest in this.
It’s easy to assume we “just” need subsidies and incentives (or the ending of same) for “green” solutions, but the problem is much larger than that. We need to be operating “sustainably” at every level, in between departments, across legislation.
If regulation is blocking us, get it changed. If changing legislation is too slow, refactor. We must go faster.
"Sorry your house fell down, but we never thought to test this stuff at temperatures that low. I mean, we thought Texas was a hot place!"
for the record, i dislike this style because it reserves the most valuable square footage—the ground floor—to cars. the cars should go underground, allowing the ground floor to be used for human purposes—ideally mixed use, even just publicly accessible studio space for creatives.
Compared to the damage that hurricanes do in the US to flimsy plywood buildings, it will probably more than be able to compete with that. Building standards are perhaps slow to change but not necessarily very advanced in the US. But you are right that this type of change is slow to implement.
I've heard firefighters talk about how their departments are considering scaling back entries on newer homes because those beams can fail so early in a fire when the binder fails.
> FPInnovations is a private not-for-profit R&D organization that specializes in the creation of solutions that accelerate the growth of the Canadian forest sector and its affiliated industries to enhance their global competitiveness
Did you read the fucking introduction? It's an industry-paid-for shill study:
> Financial support for the development of this US edition of the CLT Handbook was provided by the Bi-National Softwood Council, US Forest Products Laboratory and Forest Innovation Investment. Financial support for conducting the fire resistance test series on cross-laminated timber (CLT) was provided by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) under the Transformative Technologies Program, which was created to identify and accelerate the development and introduction of products such as CLT in North America. FPInnovations expresses its thanks to its industry members Julie Frappier, Eng. from Nordic Engineered Wood and Andre Morf from Structurlam, Dr. Nourredine Bénichou of the National Research Council of Canada, NRCan (Canadian Forest Service), the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Yukon Territory for their continuing guidance and financial support.
I guess it must be the steel industry planting astroturfers in reddit comments pretending to be firefighters talking about how they're seeing new construction buildings with engineered structural wood fold stunningly fast, huh?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90545929/mass-timber-is-the-futu...,
https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/collegeofforestry/2018/03/27/p... (demonstrating that charred CLT can maintain structural integrity at temperatures that could cause steel structures to soften and collapse. Or in other words, that steel structures can be less safe in the event of a fire than a wood structure.
Using cheaper materials for low rise might indeed be an issue. Also, living in houses that are mostly low quality plywood and other flammable materials is of course not great for fire safety. It's a tradeoff between cost, requirements, and regulations.
Even concrete buildings sometimes collapse when fire gets hot enough. Metal loses its strength when it gets warm enough. The collapse of the Twin Towers in New York are a pretty grim example of that.
Prefab/offsite fabrication can be done with most building types, it's always a tradeoff of many factors: transportation costs generally go up, onsite labor and onsite construction time goes down, offsite labor and construction time becomes a thing, precision usually goes up since the offsite construction is often in a more controlled environment, site specific adjustments can be more difficult depending on the specific methods. If there are standardized pieces, that can reduce overall time to complete a project if there's some amount of warehousing rather than building just in time; offsite construction may also speed up projects when there's more capacity to build components in a factory setting(s) than with onsite labor.
For concrete offsite fabrication, you're looking for words like 'precast' and 'tilt-up'.