I’ve followed your work on Construction Physics, Brian, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely and learned a ton!
Some thoughts:
One of the recurring points you bring up is that construction is limited in cost savings due to the transportation costs—building materials are generally heavy and have low value-to-weight ratios, so centralized manufacturing doesn’t help nearly as much as it does in other industries. That being said, do you see a solution space where the brick-making machine (including kiln if necessary) can itself be brought to the jobsite, with the material being sourced from super-local dirt/clay? I’m picturing almost a portable manufacturing pipeline, where a digging machine feeds dirt into a mixer, which deposits material into a brick mold which is then fired. The resulting bricks are assembled via robots.
Do you think an alternative to mortar could be found? Perhaps a solid resin of some sort that is laid between bricks during placement, and then heated into a liquid and cooled back solid to bond with the bricks?
Do you think the market for automated bricklaying is going to disappear as 3D printing buildings becomes more common/economical?
Re: portable brick machine, I think automation would have to advance a lot before something like this ended up being cost effective (and the resulting automation could probably do a lot of other, more interesting things than just “assemble bricks”)
Re: mortar, folks are already doing this (this is what fastbrick robotics uses, basically)
Re: 3D printing, I don’t think this is especially likely, mostly because people want brick specifically because of how it looks—it’s already a sort of cost-inefficient system that people choose for the aesthetics. Adding another system to the mix doesn’t seem like it would change this calculus, even in the event it becomes super efficient (which seems unlikely to me).
I’ve followed your work on Construction Physics, Brian, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely and learned a ton!
Some thoughts:
One of the recurring points you bring up is that construction is limited in cost savings due to the transportation costs—building materials are generally heavy and have low value-to-weight ratios, so centralized manufacturing doesn’t help nearly as much as it does in other industries. That being said, do you see a solution space where the brick-making machine (including kiln if necessary) can itself be brought to the jobsite, with the material being sourced from super-local dirt/clay? I’m picturing almost a portable manufacturing pipeline, where a digging machine feeds dirt into a mixer, which deposits material into a brick mold which is then fired. The resulting bricks are assembled via robots.
Do you think an alternative to mortar could be found? Perhaps a solid resin of some sort that is laid between bricks during placement, and then heated into a liquid and cooled back solid to bond with the bricks?
Do you think the market for automated bricklaying is going to disappear as 3D printing buildings becomes more common/economical?
Looking forward to your continued work!
Thanks!
Re: portable brick machine, I think automation would have to advance a lot before something like this ended up being cost effective (and the resulting automation could probably do a lot of other, more interesting things than just “assemble bricks”)
Re: mortar, folks are already doing this (this is what fastbrick robotics uses, basically)
Re: 3D printing, I don’t think this is especially likely, mostly because people want brick specifically because of how it looks—it’s already a sort of cost-inefficient system that people choose for the aesthetics. Adding another system to the mix doesn’t seem like it would change this calculus, even in the event it becomes super efficient (which seems unlikely to me).