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Sustainable engineers Kenoteq are reinventing the brick
- fizixer 6y agoI've heard great things about CEB (compressed earth blocks).
- woah 6y agoWhat's the binder?
- lopmotr 6y agoI thought it would be cement and they were ashamed to admit that. But their site says "no cement use when compared with concrete blocks". Not sure why "no" has to be a relative term, so something sneaky might be going on there.
- zxcmx 6y agoIf I was forced to make a bet, I would guess fly ash. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10669205B2/en?oq=US10669205B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10669205B2/en?oq=US10669... I think this is the patent, but they don't mention a "binder" per se. There are several claims specifically relating to the exclusion of "tar" which seems interesting. I think someone better versed in reading patents than I am might be able to make more sense of that. Tar just doesn't seem like their style. Maybe there are already claims on that or they are well known. But "organic matter", "tar", "cement" or "fly ash" still seem like possibilities. The patent also mentions "additive" (e.g. pigment / recycled toner) as improving the strength of the resulting bricks and reducing moisture uptake. It can be added in surprising amounts (5-20%). That doesn't seem very scalable though. Or, of course, they could have come up with something else in the meantime. Distinctly possible.
- stonogo 6y agoThis is in CNN Style for a reason. It's a neat research project, great for prestige projects like Hyde Park. It just cannot compete with clay from a cost perspective.
- Pfhreak 6y agoI'd be curious if you've got some figures or if you are just guessing that it's the case. (Intuitively, I'd agree with you, but I couldn't find any info.) Assuming also that the externalities of the existing brick manufacturing industry are not costed into the price of a standard brick. Other sources suggest that the k-briq is also more insulative than a regular brick, which should impact the cost calculations as well.
- Nasrudith 6y agoTechnically true but wouldn't going with a cheaper exterior option and using the saved cost for dedicated insulation be more efficient? Aside from airflow it is usually windows and frames where the insulation property is relevant, otherwise we would see using thicker walls instead of just spraying insulation for cheap development. I mean it is a neat concept but unfortunately efficiency often selects the "boring" option.
- hosh 6y agoOpen Source Ecology has open-source designs for a compressed earth block machine that can generate these things from the dirt on-site. These machines have been built and had been in use for some time now. They did require some knowledge that are not widely disseminated (use of water to motar them together, and other construction techniques you would not use with conventional bricks). With a CEB machine onsite, it makes construction of this type of material decentralized, without having to rely on a fragile, global supply chain. It also means getting more CEBs to affect repairs can be sourced locally, and does not require a functioning global supply chain. (Assuming you can keep the CEB machine in good repair; but that is why it is open-sourced). I think there are some heat retaining properties that CEB have that conventional bricks don't have. Combined with a hollow-core, or insulated core wall construction, the end results are housing that are more efficient with heating and cooling. When combined with permaculture design, the excavation can be done to build swales for efficient rain water harvesting. So yeah, if we only look at the cost from just the perspective of sourcing conventional bricks, maybe it won't compete. From the perspective of whole system design and resilient systems, I think CEB offers something better.
- exabrial 6y agoI think the killer invention would be to solidify C02 efficiently for building materials (much like trees do).
- saeranv 6y agoIf only we could use trees as a building material!
- rapnie 6y agoCross-laminated timber is quite promising in that regard. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cross+laminated https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cross+laminated
- eyjafjallajokul 6y agoPretty sure they are being sarcastic and referring to wooden construction (majority of US homes).
- kube-system 6y agoWe already have several reinventions of the brick which are stronger and more eco-friendly -- we call them concrete blocks. I thought it was pretty silly to compare this product to bricks on it's cost/strength/waste. People aren't choosing brick for these factors anyway. People choose brick mainly for the aesthetic.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoDo you mean Autoclaved aerated concrete? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclaved_aerated_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclaved_aerated_concrete
- kube-system 6y agoThat is one example, but there are lots of types of concrete building materials that have significant advantages over brick for various applications.
- JayPeaEm 6y agoAs a Civil Engineer & Software Engineer, we're always limited by the Construction Budget; no matter how cool something is. Even brick masonry now is split-face and limited to at-grade elevations. Speaking of reinventing, I'm still waiting on Elon Musk's eco-bricks [1] and whenever foamed metals [2] become popular. [1] - https://interestingengineering.com/boring-companys-eco-bricks-coming-soon-hints-elon-musk https://interestingengineering.com/boring-companys-eco-brick... [2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_foam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_foam
- aidenn0 6y agoYeah, I lost it when TFA referred to bricks as "The building blocks of modern suburban homes." I'm not sure what suburbs the author is familiar with where new homes are made of structural brick.
- g8oz 6y agoThe article says 1.5 trillion bricks are produced annually...wonder where they are getting used. In North America their use seems to have been relegated to facades.
- MrLeap 6y agoThis article has inspired me to make a brick. The regular kind. I have tons of clay and a forge that can melt steel, honestly it just never occured to me so now I have to try!
- tonyarkles 6y agoNow you’ve got me googling “refining clay from soil”. Our city is built on the most terrible clay gumbo imaginable, and I’ve got a huge pile of the stuff to get rid of somehow...
- hosh 6y agoSounds like a more rigorously engineered form of the Compressed Earth Brick. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Compressed_Earth_Blocks https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Compressed_Earth_Blo...
- m4rtink 6y agoMany older village houses here in Czech Republic are made from compressed earth bricks (using local materials & not fired). As long as you keep them dry, they will last basically forever. If they get wet, they loose all strength and the building collapses, making any floods particularly dangerous for such buildings.
- hosh 6y agoDo you think the k-briq they are talking about here will also lose cohesion when things get wet?
- nashashmi 6y agoAs far as different mediums for building go, check out sirewall. Or insulated rammed earth wall. It is only 9 pct cement. And can make some pretty charming spaces.
- nitwit005 6y ago> To make it, construction and demolition waste including bricks, gravel, sand and plasterboard is crushed and mixed with water and a binder I notice they don't mention what the binder is, and I see it labeled as a "secret binder" in another article.
- apprenticemason 6y agoIt would be interesting to see exactly how much CO2 was created in the process of creating a brick vs the amount of CO2 created during transportation. This tech seems like a good idea until you realize every brick is being produced in one spot in England... the real problem isn’t creating these bricks, it’s building out the infrastructure to supply a significant demand. I work in the masonry trade, all of the materials we use are from brick yards and quarries that are local (~75-100mi radius) for the simple fact that transporting large numbers of pallets of brick over long distances is a logistical nightmare. Storing them can also prove to be a problem, so much so that we literally throw away thousands of bricks we have left over from jobs every year. It’s rare that two customers would use the same bricks and we end up keeping the extras until we know we’re not getting called back in to do additional work. They’re right that reclaiming bricks as being labor intensive work. The real holy grail of this industry would be figuring out how to reclaim the trillions of bricks already in circulation without needing human intervention. There is often huge demand for antique bricks because a lot of the unique clay deposits used to create the bricks end up being totally depleted. Milwaukee, WI is famous for their Cream City bricks that were produced in the mid and late 19th century but once the unique clay beds used to create these bricks were gone, so were new Cream Cities. You can see these in just about every city’s downtown in Wisconsin. I’ve spent many hours reclaiming these bricks from old houses and factories because for one, they look incredible, and two, they’re worth about a dollar a piece once they’re ready to be laid again (Pretty good money if you’re good with a brick hammer). If there was a way you could dump a house worth of old bricks into one end of a black box and spit out reusable brick from the other end, you’d basically be printing money. Mortar is not easily removed from brick without damaging the brick. That’s kind of the whole point of the mortar being used as a binder in the first place.
- qohen 6y agoMilwaukee, WI is famous for their Cream City bricks For anyone interested, Cream City bricks has a Wikipedia page[0] with pictures of buildings built with them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cream_City_brick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cream_City_brick
- brownbat 6y agoTim Harford has an episode about why bricks have been so great for humanity for so long, and a bit on why they are so hard to improve on: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz2w8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz2w8