
Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture - robdoherty2
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-14/ancient-roman-concrete-is-about-to-revolutionize-modern-architecture
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jdhendrickson
We have known about the composition of Roman Concrete for a long time, the
main difference is we trade long term strength for a shorter curing time. For
an excellent dissection of this recent round of "secrets technology of the
ancients that our modern science only now is beginning to understand" check
out this reddit thread, it has quite a few engineering students and
professionals chiming in and I learned quite a bit from it.
[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1fohl2/berkeley_dis...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1fohl2/berkeley_discovers_a_way_to_make_concrete_that_is/)

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codexon
This was posted on Reddit like a month ago.

People knew about Roman concrete. According to CivE people in the thread, the
problem is that volcanic ash isn't present everywhere and it sets much slower
than Portland cement.

This study was paid for by a Saudi Arabian University, and as mentioned in the
article, Saudi Arabia happens to have a lot of volcanic ash.

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sandGorgon
In India there is a huge demand (quite outstripping supply) for flyash bricks,
made from the industrial byproduct of coal burning furnaces (which supply >50%
of India's power supply). They closely resemble the properties of volcanic
ash.

The supply is likely to go down even further as we transition into gas
furnaces and nuclear power.

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InclinedPlane
One downside of building things using flyash that people are going to be
around a lot is that it increases radioactivity exposure. I'm not sure how it
compares to granite though, but it can be fairly significant.

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brilee
Of course ancient Roman concrete is better than what we have now. The ancient
Roman concrete that wasn't better than what we have now, didn't survive to
today. There was probably a wide range of random kinds of concrete, and a
2000-year experiment has told us which of those random kinds was the best.

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speeder
More or less... There are Roman-era writings describing their most common
method of making concrete.

What made me flabbergasted is that only NOW someone say this is news...

Seriously, if the thing was written down already 2000 years ago, why noone
bothered to test?

Or they did, but other reasons made corporations not use it?

My dad is a engineer, and he told me that some old bridges here in Brazil made
with such concrete are REALLY HARD to explode for some reason...

I don't know if that is the case with the bridge that Luisa Erundina tried to
explode in São Paulo, but here we have a bridge that there was 4 attempts to
explode by a specialized demolitions engineering company, and it barely got
dented.

EDIT: of course, most common for important buildings... Poor people won't use
that sort of concrete, one of the ingredients is volcanic ash, and you cannot
find volcanic ash everywhere, it was probably more or less expensive.

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dhughes
The formula for (Roman) concrete was lost for centuries or the Romans didn't
share it which also makes sense if you're a militaristic society why give away
the secret to concrete?

And it's only recently the secret of Roman concrete was discovered.

Also I don't think Roman concrete is exactly the same as what we think of
concrete it's not like the Romans poured it out into forms as is done today.

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SmokyBorbon
If by recently you mean like 50 years ago, then yes, recently.

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Turing_Machine
Compared to how long it's been since the Empire fell, yeah, that's quite
recent.

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btilly
I've known for decades that Roman concrete was much better than what we have
now. I would love to see it come back into common use.

The article is, of course, blogspam for [http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-
releases/2013/06/04/roman-con...](http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-
releases/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/) but the submission of the latter got lost
in the shuffle and blogspam is better than nothing.

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temp453463343
Is it just me, or does it sound like they're glossing over the downsides?

“It could replace 40 percent of the world’s demand for Portland cement."

Why not 100%?

Sounds like the cure for cancer. I'll believe it when I see it =)

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TheCoelacanth
Realistically, it can't replace most uses of concrete. Roman concrete takes
years to reach full strength. The stuff we use is close to full strength in
days.

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einhverfr
Those who do not understand Roman concrete are destined to reinvent it badly
;-)

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james33
It is remarkable that with all of today's technology and advances, there are
still areas to be found where we have yet to match the engineering prowess of
thousands of years old civilizations.

~~~
sliverstorm
I would not call it "engineering prowess". I would call it "experimentation"
or "luck". The Roman Empire lasted 450 years, so they had plenty of time for
experimentation, and it was near plenty of volcanic ash, which provided ample
opportunity to luck into a good formula.

Obviously they came up with something good, and deserve credit. But to call
that a triumph of Roman engineering over modern engineering? If I grew up in a
land possessing an abundance of of nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, would you
proclaim how advanced my science was, if I came up with gunpowder?

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datalus
Environment plays a huge role in everything, constructing superior concrete is
no exception. That doesn't preclude it from being useful at the end of the
day...

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fractallyte
Also check out this website (and book) by another researcher:
[http://www.romanconcrete.com/](http://www.romanconcrete.com/)

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throwaway10001
This is not news, I am not in the field and have known it for ages. So have
cement makers that make specialized cement.

The immediate money will be in making a special liquid that can be sprayed in
existing concrete building to make them last longer. If I'm building a 100
story tower in NYC, why spend, say x% more, when the building is likely to be
sold 20 times in those 100 years? Now if I'm a state government with crumbling
bridges, I'm extremely interested to make them last another 10-100 years.

They are many companies already like Penetron that have special solutions to
stop water penetration. MIT, IIRC, figured out how to stop the chemical
reaction in concrete, making it last a theoretical 16,000 years.
[http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/creep-0615.html](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/creep-0615.html)

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ForFreedom
Funny we learn everything that was 3000 years ago and from nature.

