Some Questions Answered

I've had a few thoughts floating through my head that I haven't really been able to answer but it seems I've found a magazine article that explains some of it. Found here, the article, written by Zach Zorich back in 2005 for Discover Magazine, helped answer the questions, "Who's studying flexible concrete?" and "How much does flexible concrete cost?" With this article and the video I found 2 weeks ago, it seems that, if I want to look into the studies done on flexible concrete, I should look for professor Victor Li of the University of Michigan. He seems to be one of the main Civil Engineers working on this type of project. Also from the article, it was stated that flexible concrete is approximately 3 times more expensive than standard concrete. Standard concrete is somewhere close to $100 for every cubic yard created. That means flexible concrete would be in the $300 range for every cubic yard. To put this into perspective, a single car driveway is usually designed to be 10 feet wide and 18 feet long. Then, on top of that information, the slabs of concrete are designed to be, at a minimum, 4 inches thick. With a bit of math, this driveway uses 2.22 cubic yards of concrete resulting in costs of $222 for standard concrete use and $666 for flexible concrete use. While this doesn't seem like much, think about trying to do this on thousands of miles of roads throughout the country which, due to heavier loads like tractor trailers and hundreds of cars passing over per hour, the cost would be astronomical. But, this is information from almost 11 years ago (hard to think it has been 11 years since 2005) which means that it is entirely possible the Professor Li, along with many other Civil Engineers who may have tasked themselves with studying this relatively new material, were able to reduce the cost of flexible concrete. These were just a couple things I have been thinking about and now have a basis on where to look next.

Carbon Nanotubes and Cement

In class the other day, while working in the library, I found an interesting study done that I was actually curious about (which can be founder here). I was curious about how the use of carbon nanotubes would effect flexible concrete. This conducted test measured multiple different strengths with multiple different forms of carbon nanotubes and was able to show that they actually do increase the strength within a cement mixture, a key part in concrete and flexible concrete. The amazing thing about carbon nanotubes is just how ridiculously small they are. As seen within the study, images were taken of the various forms of nanotubes tested and have to be referenced on the micrometer scale. That's .000001 meters or 1/39360000". Due to their size and tested strengths, they are a material that has one of the highest strength to weight ratios ever recorded. The only issue is that they, currently, can only be made to be extremely short in length, short enough that the nanotubes can still be measured in that micrometer scale. This also leads to an economical issue since the production of these ridiculously small objects tends to be very expensive. Hopefully one day they won't be and who knows what can come of this relatively new material. I'm looking forward to seeing if there is a way to make the nanotubes possible on the economic side in my next bout of research because, as seen in the conducted study, they worked extremely well on the strength side.