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from the how-about-a-nice-game-of-breakout? dept.
An Australian engineer has built a robot that can build houses in two
hours[days -Ed.], and could work every day to build houses for people.Human housebuilders have to work for four to six weeks to put a house together, and have to take weekends and holidays. The robot can work much more quickly and doesn't need to take breaks.
Hadrian could take the jobs of human bricklayers. But its creator, Mark Pivac, told PerthNow that it was a response to the lack of available workers — the average age of the industry is getting much higher, and the robot might be able to fill some of that gap.
[...] Hadrian works by laying 1000 bricks an hour, letting it put up 150 houses a year.
It takes a design of the house and then works out where all of the bricks need to go, before cutting and laying each of them. It has a 28-foot arm, which is used to set and mortar the brick, and means that it doesn't need to move during the laying.
Throw in a brick-making bot and the stage is set for guerilla housing construction. Homelessness would become a thing of the past.
Apparently from: perthnow.com; a video is available on youtube.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 27 2015, @08:39PM
You wouldn't want to have a wood frame house down in tornado alley.
You wouldn't want a brick one either. Earthquakes can and do happen everywhere. "Tornado Alley" isn't that far from the New Madrid fault line.
For tornado-prone places, you want a steel-frame house with rebar-reinforced and filled concrete walls, or at the least, one room in the middle of the house built this way which you can use as a safe room.
In general, the brick house will have a superior internal climate (balancing of day/night temperature differences) and offer better sound protection simply because of its higher mass.
That's why you put brick in front of the framing. You don't need to use it as a structural element. Any house in the US built in the last few decades or so which looks like a brick house is built this way. No one uses brick as a structural element any more.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday June 27 2015, @09:31PM
That's why you put brick in front of the framing.
That won't work for colder and wetter climates, at least if (as usual in Germany) the wood frame contains the thermal insulation. With "brick-outside", water vapour will pass through the inner (wood/insulation) wall and then condense on the inside of the cold brick wall. Same effect as general inside-insulation. That area will be covered in mould within 5 years. Migitation strategies include:
1.) a vapour barrier on the very inside (said to be not permanently reliable)
2.) particularly porous bricks to transport condensed water to the outside with a capillary effect (can crack when freezing)
3.) ventilation behind the stone facade (extremely reliable, but sacrifices all climatic gain)
4.) forced ventilation of the house inside (seems to be "good enough" in current field trials, but opens different cans of worms).
You definitely want to have the heavy mass inside the insulation if any climatic balancing effect is desired and you want to avoid condensation worries. There's been a lively discussion in the German building scene because of insulation requirements demanding filling of air gaps between double walls (cf. 3 above). These requirements (currently "EnEV 2014") push the energy savings to a maximum, but at times move faster than what can be reliably proven over time.
If you want to play around with where a wall will drown from the inside, check http://www.u-wert.net/ [u-wert.net]. Of course Southern Californians need not apply.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @11:47PM
Florida.
No earthquakes. Ever.
Most of the very recent construction seems to be timber framed, but there are a lot of CMU block houses. I'm living in one now. With the blocks, insulation, smart windows that guarantee sunlight never gets funneled into the house, and trees overhead, I only use air conditioning rarely.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday June 28 2015, @02:52AM
Florida. No earthquakes. Ever.
Not necessarily true... [usgs.gov]