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.