Perfect Aircrete, Kitchen Ingredients.

I've said it before that I'm not much of a DIY-er, so I'm not likely to make my own cement blocks to build anything, but I like the idea of trying this as a project with my students to balance strength/weight/cost in a building material.

The short version of the above video is that a version of aircrete can be made with xanthan gum, rubbing alcohol, water, dish soap, and cement with some vigorous mixing (a kitchen blender, a drill with a drywall mud attachment, or a smallish cement mixer).

Amazing Lego-Style HEMP BLOCKS Make Building a House Quick, Easy & Sustainable

Hempcrete?

The hempcrete blocks make me think a whole lot of straw bricks, a pretty old composite technology - which falls into my frequently-reinforced observation that the more environmentally friendly a technology is, the more likely it is to be an updated version of technology that humans were using a thousand or more years ago.

Here the 'hempcrete' is really hemp hurd mixed with lime. The lime then absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as the hempcrete sets.

Hemp has long been put forth as a renewable resource with fibers that can be useful in lots of ways.

If you're interested in learning more about hempcrete...

• Carbon Smart Materials Palette
• American Lime Technology
• Hempitecture
• Hemptraders

Why 3D Printing Buildings Leads to Problems

It's tough to repair a building that is a single piece of material.

That's the short answer to the rhetorical question posed in the video's title, though the host goes into a lot more detail than that simple sentence.

He also explains that making a house out of a single material defeats the purpose of using different materials on the inside (drywall, for example) and outside (bricks or siding, for example) of the house; that no single material will work for walls, doors, and windows necessitating the merging of the 3d printed materials with some sort of additional structure for those features, partially defeating the advantages of 3d printing; and the 3d printed house's size is restricted by the size of gantry on which the 3d printer moves.

I subscribe to Stewart Hicks's channel, primarily covering architecture and focusing on the Chicagoland area with a frequent highlighting of Frank Lloyd Wright's work. Most of the videos aren't on material science but rather on the architecture.

Inside America's mass timber movement

That's going to be a very contemporarily pretty airport.

I don't get the idea of an airport where people will just come to hang out as a community space because I'm thinking that's going to freak out a whole bunch of security folks, but in the long run that's not a materials question, so I'll leave that aside for now.

The mass timber movement seems to go back to basics, using bonded wood from supposedly sustainable forests to build gorgeous buildings. Here's to hoping that it works.

Cement Tiles Almost Disappeared. Now They’re More Expensive Than Ever | So Expensive

Those are absolutely gorgeous tiles. When my wife and I were redoing our shower, I went with a raku tile for the small accent shelf that we added, but if I'd known about these cement tiles before hand, I might've been tempted by them. 

Remember, of course, that these are cement tiles, not concrete tiles...ceramic not composite...though the layering might make them a laminar composite anyway...hmmm...

Building a medieval castle from scratch

I assume these folks are using medieval techniques to build their castle because they want to not because they're just stubbornly French, right?

I remember in Thomas Thwaites's Toaster Project video that he mentioned needing to go further and further backwards in time when he wanted to bring the scope of industrial processes down to human-sized scales. If he wanted to smelt iron for a single toaster, he wasn't going to build an industrial blast furnace; he was going to find how they heated iron ore thousands of years ago.

That concept resonates as I see an ancient castle being built in modern times but with ancient techniques. They aren't looking for large-scale, industrial processes. They're looking for ancient craftsman methods.

If you want to see more, I'm putting a few more videos after the jump.

How Bricks Made From Invasive Seaweed Clean Mexico's Beaches | World Wide Waste | Insider Business

I was at Indian Lake in northern Ohio recently and saw a vehicle/machine driving back and forth in the water about twenty feet out from Oldfield Beach. When I asked what the machine was doing, I was told that it was chopping up and supposedly harvesting invasive pondweed (details of the plan here) that was plaguing the lake because of its shallowness and prevalence of fertilizer run-off from nearby farms leading to blue-green algae blooms and near dead zones.

I don't have any idea what they're doing with the pondweed that they harvest from Indian Lake, but I feel like I might was to put those folks in touch with the subject of today's video as he seems to have found something to do with unwanted aquatic plant growth. 

Linoleum flooring is cool, actually

"If there were a floor covering Olympics, marble would probably get gold. Hardwood would get silver. Bronze would maybe go to tile — and linoleum wouldn’t even make the trials. Arguably the most maligned flooring there is, these days linoleum is considered (at best) something you rip out to get to the real floor. But it wasn’t always that way."

That's the description from the YouTube description as Vox wrote and is shown below the video. I'm not sure I can do much better than that.

Linoleum sucks. That's the general, modern impression of linoleum, but there's a lot more to the fascinating history and construction of the composite flooring known colloquially as linoleum.

There's really nothing wrong with linoleum, but it's just way out of fashion. It does require some waxing, but according to this video, it's way more environmentally friendly than vinyl - which I have throughout my entire home, natch.

Oh, that shot at 0:09 makes me think that the red, gray, and white flooring at Princeton High School is linoleum.

And the YouTube description includes links to learn more about the history and modern revival of linoleum.

Heineken WOBO Bottle | Object in Focus | V&A

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Glass is a generally a fairly environmentally-friendly material, being made primarily of sand, so the idea of reusing glass bottles to build homes after they were used for their initial, beer-transporting purpose is brilliant.

I wish it would have worked out...and I also kind of wish I had one of the WOBO bottles, but with only 100,000 of them having been made, I'm guessing the sell for a pretty penny.

How The World Of Building Materials Is Responding To Climate Change

Source - https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/15/21058051/climate-change-building-materials-mass-timber-cross-laminated-clt 

I will readily admit that I can't stand Science Friday.

I'm an NPR guy all the way, and I'm a science geek. Science Friday should be right up my alley. It's like they've made a show just to hook me in. (It's like Newton's Apple - which I loved as a kid - for the radio.)

And then Ira Flatow comes on and asks inane questions like, "what's your favorite cephalopod?" or "what does alligator poop smell like?" of serious scientists trying to discuss their research. If it weren't for Ira, I might really love Science Friday.

Occasionally, though, the topic is interesting enough that I fight through my Ira-loathing and stay tuned to WVXU (my local NPR station, I'm a sustaining member, doncha know).

In late February, for example, there was a segment (thirty-three minutes long) about mass timber buildings (buildings with wooden structural members) titled How the World of Building Materials is Responding to Climate Change.

Increasing concerns with steel and concrete construction - both release huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the material's initial production - are leading people back toward building with wood - or some form of engineered wood-based products (laminates, particle composites, etc) as a way to avoid the carbon dioxide release from concrete and steel production.

Not that the concrete industry isn't fighting back.

Wooden Laboratory - Periodic Table of Videos

Just about every single thing that we do damages the environment.

At the very least - even if we go as neutral and non-pejorative with that idea as we can - everything that we do changes the environment.

Bit by bit we're figuring out that we can't keep doing that with every building that we erect.

Here's a great video of how the University of Nottingham planned out their most environmentally-friendly laboratory building yet.

They used as little steel and cement as they could, made sure their systems were efficient, brought in natural light wherever they could, included photovoltaics with the windows, and tried to find a way to 'do science in a fundamentally different way.'

Separately, I recommend checking out the entire YouTube channel of Periodic Videos from the University of Nottingham. It's more chemistry than it is material science, but it's fun stuff.

Sep 11 - "Why the Towers Fell" - Nova PBS

It is human nature to look back with one eye to the future. If we can just figure out why that happened, we can make sure it doesn't happen again. That is, at its core, what failure analysis is all about.

NOVA, the PBS series, produced the documentary "Why the Towers Fell" looking at the conclusions of the engineers and scientists on the government's exploration panel attempting to answer the titular question. In their findings there are a number of material science connections...

• tradoffs among cost, weight, and strength - particularly at 11:30
• design constraints - 12:45 (designed for impact of a Boeing 707, the largest at the time of design)
• mechanical testing methods (sheer, tension, vertical load) - 33:30
• heat softening of the steel - 37:45, 44:35 (and throughout in small mentions typically as "the heat would have softened the steel")
• failure analysis - all throughout, particularly at 45:00

NOVA also posted a website of information related to this episode, much of which is still online. Some links are starting to fail, however. The best of these are a very readable summary of the findings, the engineering history of the Towers, and a java interactive showing what metal atoms do as heat is applied.

This one's tough for me to post and was even tough for me to watch. I didn't have a direct connection to the tragedy of the Twin Towers, but I had at least one student who did, who knew someone on one of the planes. If it isn't already obvious, be aware that some of our students - or coworkers - may have closer connections and may still struggle with memories of the incident, of loved ones who were closer to the Towers, or even - like me - have memories of being in the Towers and being two or three relationship steps away from the tragedy.

Materials for a better planet

Wired magazine isn't always useful for material science, but every couple of months they publish an outstanding, multi-page or single-page article on the topics.

In the March 2014 issue they provided a one-page summary of four environmentally-friendly building materials.