Sebastian Köln

It is good at all the things we are not proud of as humans...
- making stuff up (including citations)
- pretending to be someone else
- sounding very confident about it
- it steals text without attribution
- never gets to the point
- long answers that don't say much

I don't like it. Marketing loves it but they don't get the blame if it doesn't work as expected.

If one has stacks of old tires...
- Interlinked concrete blocks (Video by the India Depatment of Earthquake Engineering)

The earthbag method made me think of weaving the "bag" into the layers of mud blocks instead.
This also ties the layers together in the vertical direction.

Here are 2 kinds of bands:
- Horizontal bands in green on the inside and outside of each block layer.
- vertical weaving bands that move between the inside and outside of the blocks. Spaced so that every block is supported between bands on every side.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:

Sebastian Köln wrote:What options did I miss?

-reinforced concrete blocks
-reinforced structural bricks
-concrete frame with infill
-steel frame with infill
-wood logs

If wood is an inexpensive option, that is probably the best as it is flexible enough to just flex and not take much damage. Unfortunately the dry areas don't have much forests.
I think a steel frame would be very expensive. In rural areas probably too expensive and too difficult to transport the material.
From the videos of shake table tests that I have seen, bricks and concrete blocks don't perform very well.
A concrete frame with (lightweight) infill is a good option (but requires cement and formwork).


The earthbags gave me an idea to weave reinforment bands between the earth blocks.

T Simpson wrote:Do you know of a source of long fiber tube bags?

There is a lot of hemp grown in the area I am interested in, I was thinking about feeding that into a circular loom.

Thank you for pointing that out!
I was previously skeptical about earthbag because of all the plastic, but it should be possible to use bags / tubes made from natural fibers instead.

The recent earthquake in Morocco was a cruel reminder that just building with mud bricks or rammed earth can be deadly.

The biggest conflict in terms of building design is thermal mass. From a comfort perspective one wants as thermal mass as possible in the walls, but from an engineering perspective the building should be as light as possible as the entire building needs to be tied together to survive an earthquake and the amount of reinforcing is proportional to the mass of the building (and its height).


Approaches I have found so far:
- build with reinforced concrete
- wooden frame with lightweight infill
- compressed earth blocks with geomesh on the outside or between layers
- using good geometry

What options did I miss?

I suspect the air temperature drops the higher the air is above the hot ground in that climate.
But I have far not found many publications that measured this.

If you have dry air, look at the historic architecture of the Arabic countries. (Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia...)

- Avoiding sun hitting the walls
- thick walls
- Good ventilation

If you can find a ball that is somewhat larger than the pipe you want to put through, you can put it into the old pipe at one end and connect a vacuum cleaner at the other. If it makes it through you can attach a string to the ball and repeat to pull the string though. Connect a stronger rope and pull that through. Then you can use that to pull the new pipe through.