Concrete Canvas: Revolutionary Product, Untapped Potential
Technology
Material
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April 27, 2016 at 05:26 PM
Just Imagine, the concrete lining for a ditch or bund arriving in a roll of cloth, just needing to be rolled out in place, cut to size, stitched, watered and dried to be ready to use. Or a military or refugee tent arrives in a bag, just inflate, wet and dry it to get a strong and durable shelter… and all done in a matter of hours! This is just the type of revolutionary idea or product that has the potential to render established technologies and methods redundant due to its enormous time and cost saving capability and wide ranging applicability. Yet, Concrete Canvas or Concrete Cloth, developed by amateur U.K. researchers in 2005 and launched successfully as a patented product aiming to serve the construction industry, has not been able to realize its full potentiality as it promised. We take a look at the product and ground-breaking research behind it, its development, applicability, cost and ease of application, sustainability, patents and prototypes.
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Concrete Canvas or Cloth is simply cement impregnated fabric that is designed to set on hydrating it sufficiently and letting dry for a requisite time. In the state in which it is available, i.e. as a fabric, it is as pliable and foldable as any cloth. But once it is wetted it sets into shape and hardens on drying to form an impregnable, strong, durable water and fire-proof concrete surface. The wetting or hydrating can be done by either spraying or immersion.
The Concrete Canvas can be cut using hand tools and its layers can easily be nailed, stapled or sealed with adhesive to attach them to each other. It is very easy to work with and install at any site, avoiding the hassle of mixing, measuring and laying concrete on site. This also makes it about ten times faster to install than traditional concreting. It saves an enormous amount of expense which is usually incurred for maintaining and running of machinery and man-power.
Students of Industrial Design Engineering at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art in London, Peter Brewin and Will Crawford, working together to explore new material possibilities that could increase ease and speed of installation in the construction industry, came up with this revolutionary material that took the cement world by storm. They patented the technology they had invented and launched the manufacture of their two award winning products, Concrete Canvas and Concrete Canvas Shelters in 2005.
Its applications are very wide-ranging, the most popularly successful one being in lining of slopes, ditches, canals and bunds. Its application can prevent erosion and landslides in hilly areas and is considered to be a perfect fit to line canals and ditches with. It has also been used for protection of pipelines, even under water. It was famously used by the British army in Afghanistan, initially as a primary test and later as a rewarding bulk commission to the producers, for reinforcing sand bags (img 14) and other temporary and instant construction uses. This material, Concrete Canvas, is available in rolls of standard dimensions, though there have been instances of manufacturing to customised dimensions. People have even attempted making concrete furniture (img 15) by stitching up the canvas into shape before hydrating and hardening it!
The most amazing application, though, has been in the making of temporary shelters useful to military and disaster refugee camps. Feted famously as a ‘building in a bag’, these concrete canvas shelters (image 9 – 12) are folded up and packed in a sack to be transported to the site where they need to be erected. At site, during a 20 minute period of inflation, the sack assumes the form of a tent with a concrete canvas exterior which resembles a giant egg and an interior lined with plastic. Some hours of hydrating and drying render it totally habitable. These are the Concrete Canvas Shelters, which showed a lot of promise in their application where instant shelters needed to be erected.
While initially trying to find a market for these shelters in the aid sector through NGOs which work for disaster relief, the producers of Concrete Canvas Shelters hit many road blocks like costing and pricing, the shelters’ durability resulting in their semi-permanent nature, balancing pricing with volume of orders and involving and managing government and other donors. As a result, despite its being suited in these areas of application, Concrete Canvas Shelters have not been used here yet. These shelters have mainly been supplied to various militaries like that of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Netherlands and U.A.E, which have used them primarily for testing but not purchased more despite being extremely impressed with the product. Resulting from these problems which spring from the issue of scale and organisation of the company not matching up to demand and price expectations, only around 20 shelters have been erected worldwide so far.
The manufacturers now primarily focus on producing Concrete Canvas in rolls, which are faring better at the market though nowhere near the expected potential for such a brilliant product. Having patented the product, the organisation has apparently not been able to meet the market demand for it despite having territorial distributors, perhaps on account of a relatively small scale of production. The production of this material, which is produced in the U.S.A by Milliken as Concrete Cloth, may require franchising or the Concrete Canvas Company may have to better organise its production and supply for their revolutionary product to gain access to apt points of its utility and application.
In the meanwhile, as happens in all such cases, less expensive prototypes using substituted ingredients have been developed and deployed worldwide. One such example based in the U.K. itself uses a fibreglass sandwich instead of fabric, and has set up a successful distribution network which includes Mumbai in India.
Concrete Canvas represents the kind of rare revolution in building technology which can potentially transform traditional concreting techniques permanently. Being undeniably far better in terms of ease of installation, time, manpower and material required; it is also sustainable as, despite not being carbon neutral, it reduces the carbon footprint of concreting by 95% on account of these reduced inputs. The world only wishes for the incumbent production, supply and pricing issues to be sorted in order to be able to actualise its blessings.
Designer :
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Photography :internet resources
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