What are Am-cor's products made from? Am-Cor's steel buildings are made from Silicon, one the most plentiful elements in the earth. Ferro cement skin is applied to ferro cement. The skin is applied on one...
Ferro cement skin is applied to ferro cement. The skin is applied on one side in order that it becomes, what they call, a monocoque structure. This is French. Ferro cement was invented in France in 1854. It has a way of reinforcing a small amount of concrete to make a very, very strong skin. I don't know if you're familiar with stress skin panels or other skin structures, but skin structures are probably the most efficient structures known to man. They're used for boat holds, spaceship holds, and thin bolts. The early Ferro cement work that was done was used to make cement boat holes in market places.
All that cement in between the bars is actually dead weight. It's not only useless structurally, but it's the weight that's going to kill somebody if there is an earthquake and the cement slab cracks. Ferro cement on the other hand, has a lot of bars placed very close together in a very thin cement matrix; I would say not more than 3 inches thick. The problem with it has been of course the cost in making the form. Otherwise, every time we build a concrete structure, we first build a wood structure strong enough to hold up wet concrete. This is one of the heaviest materials we know of. So, we spend a tremendous amount of time and effort in material to create a formwork for the structure. Then once we reinforce and pour that cement we have to take the wood structure back down. So now we've used up a lot of wood, which as you know is not environmentally friendly. We basically discard it unless we are making multiple structures that are all the same.
We use a lot of cement in creating a regular building. Now the interesting thing about cement is that it takes a lot of heat to calcinate. For every ton of cement made, there is a ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, which has a tremendous effect on the climate.
The Chinese are now building bridges, roads, overpasses, railways, and super highways, you name it. For every ton of cement they pour, a ton of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. That's clouds and clouds of carbon dioxide. A ton of cement is a very small amount of cement or concrete.
You can easily pour thousands of tons to make a standard bridge, or a standard apartment building structure. The Am-Cor system takes the concept of the Ferro cement structure and miniaturizes it. Instead of casting a 4-3 inch slab, I worked with a cement specialist to develop a kind of cement that we could use to cast a half inch slab. That also reduced the amount of reinforcing that was required, because the slab wasn't as heavy. Every time you cast concrete, the majority of the structure is actually just to hold up the structure. Remember I just said concrete was a 150 lbs, a cubic foot. Well, a normal weight in an office building would be somewhere between 50 lbs. and 100 lbs. a square foot, for the live load.
There is plenty of cement material because it's basically silicon. Silicon is one of the elements most plentiful in the earth surface next to iron. So, the basic ingredients of reinforced concrete are all over the place. Silicon is sand. So, although the allocation of resources is not important in terms of supply, it is very important in terms of the amount of air pollution that is required when these substances are smelted down and refined and made into building products.
The same goes for steel. Steel takes a lot of heat first in the smelting and then in the forming, so there is a huge amount of carbon dioxide released by whatever fuel is burnt to make steel for reinforcing. So, when you look at the Am-Cor system versus standard construction, you're looking at one-tenth of the cement and about half the steel to create the same structure.
Most of the building going on in the world right now today is being done with reinforced concrete, precast concrete, or reinforced masonry. This basically means concrete and masonry put together. What the Am-Cor system offers to these people who are building this way, which is the majority of the world, is a way not only to save money for themselves in terms of buying less material and placing less material, but to reduce drastically the amount of emission that are going to be made to bring the third world up to "first world economies" with the infrastructure required. Ferro cement has been used to build bridges. It has been used experimentally in almost every kind of structure. What the Am-Cor system does is miniaturizes it, and makes it applicable to 85% of the structures, which are medium rise, 1-3 story buildings.
