Transparent Concrete 361
rakerman writes: "The Economist reports in How to see through walls that development is underway on translucent concrete, with hopes of eventually developing transparent concrete. Can transparent aluminium be far behind?"
Metropolis Magazine Article, April 2001 (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, this is old news. Metropolis magazine reported on the development of translucent concrete [metropolismag.com] back in April 2001.
Re:Transparent aluminum (Score:5, Insightful)
Metallic aluminum cannot be transparent except in thin films; this will be explained in a reply to the top-level post in this thread.
interesting idea (Score:2, Insightful)
on the other hand, at my old middle school, the school had outgrown it's original gym, and elected to build a second gym away from the main building, made entirely from concrete. I never understood how that thing stood; it was full-sized, housed a cafeteria in one end, and above that was the wrestling mat. to get to the point, it was abysmally dark in there. they had xeon HID lamps or the likes in there, and things were still pretty dim. emergency lights would no doubt have poorly lit it also. making the east and west walls semi-translucent would have significgantly improved lighting conditions.
i wonder if you could put an element in this "concrete" that would block IR light, otherwise I can't see this being implimented in the south or very far north, as it would cause massive heat-loss/absorbsion.
Light Pollution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Transparent Aluminum is for *Rebar* (Score:2, Insightful)
If this understanding of mine is correct, transparent aluminium (or any other metal reinforcement) is not likely to happen, but some sort of plastic may do the trick.
Blend of two transp. materials is not always ... (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to assume that if one mixes two transparent
components (e.g. glass grid, and some transparant matrix), the result is also transparent.
This is not true, as every high school boy that studied optics can tell you. Refraction index, surface properties etc.
It will probably be pretty hard to make a transparant material from two components, let alone keep the other properties of concrete.
Recycle (Score:2, Insightful)
This tells me they must be using some VERY uncommon bonding agent. They do mention the use of glass, which is a sand product anyway, being used.
It's hard to imagine why they couldn't recycle this stuff like they recycle concrete now. It makes me even more curious as to what their formula is.
Back to the future (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:But what about the birds? (Score:0, Insightful)
And we really need to get over bird strikes as a reason to NOT do something beneficial to the environment IE wind power, transparent structures that need less electrical lighting, etc. The simple fact of the matter is that more birds would be killed by pollution than would be killed by introducing new technologies that use less energy(or generate energy for FREE)
Re:Transparent Aluminum? (Score:2, Insightful)
Fire resistant? Or toxic smoke as it burns? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully the designer is taking into account other properties besides strength.