Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
People knew about Roman concrete. According to CivE people in the thread, the problem is that volcanic ash isn't present everywhere and it sets much slower than Portland cement.
This study was paid for by a Saudi Arabian University, and as mentioned in the article, Saudi Arabia happens to have a lot of volcanic ash.
Most countries sponsor research into subjects that affect their agricultural, mineral or industrial outcomes.
The supply is likely to go down even further as we transition into gas furnaces and nuclear power.
What made me flabbergasted is that only NOW someone say this is news...
Seriously, if the thing was written down already 2000 years ago, why noone bothered to test?
Or they did, but other reasons made corporations not use it?
My dad is a engineer, and he told me that some old bridges here in Brazil made with such concrete are REALLY HARD to explode for some reason...
I don't know if that is the case with the bridge that Luisa Erundina tried to explode in São Paulo, but here we have a bridge that there was 4 attempts to explode by a specialized demolitions engineering company, and it barely got dented.
EDIT: of course, most common for important buildings... Poor people won't use that sort of concrete, one of the ingredients is volcanic ash, and you cannot find volcanic ash everywhere, it was probably more or less expensive.
And it's only recently the secret of Roman concrete was discovered.
Also I don't think Roman concrete is exactly the same as what we think of concrete it's not like the Romans poured it out into forms as is done today.
I think I sprained an eye muscle from the abrupt roll.
The article is, of course, blogspam for http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con... but the submission of the latter got lost in the shuffle and blogspam is better than nothing.
“It could replace 40 percent of the world’s demand for Portland cement."
Why not 100%?
Sounds like the cure for cancer. I'll believe it when I see it =)
Obviously they came up with something good, and deserve credit. But to call that a triumph of Roman engineering over modern engineering? If I grew up in a land possessing an abundance of of nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, would you proclaim how advanced my science was, if I came up with gunpowder?
Another example is Roman pottery. By sheer coincidence the clay they used was of exceptionally high quality (extremely fine particles, IIRC) so Roman pottery is extremely hard and durable, much harder and durable than we can make pottery today. Unfortunately, there was only one source of this clay (somewhere on the coast of Italy) and the Romans depleted it.
The immediate money will be in making a special liquid that can be sprayed in existing concrete building to make them last longer. If I'm building a 100 story tower in NYC, why spend, say x% more, when the building is likely to be sold 20 times in those 100 years? Now if I'm a state government with crumbling bridges, I'm extremely interested to make them last another 10-100 years.
They are many companies already like Penetron that have special solutions to stop water penetration. MIT, IIRC, figured out how to stop the chemical reaction in concrete, making it last a theoretical 16,000 years. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/creep-0615.html