Concrete Canvas - The building in a bag
Concrete Canvas Shelter - The building in a bag.The Concrete Canvas Shelter has won 11 awards including the Saatchi and Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas. Several patents have been filed.
The Need:
Concrete Canvas Shelter (CCS) has 2 major advantages over tents:
1) Operational: CCS enables a hardened structure from day one of a crisis. It provides much better environmental protection in extreme climatic conditions, better security against looting and enables otherwise impossible medical procedures.
2) Financial: CCS has a design life of over 10 years, whereas tents only survive for 2 years and must be replaced. Therefore, Concrete Canvas is a one stop solution, saving effort and costs over the lifetime of medium to long term operations.
Key Facts
• Rapid: enables users to produce hardened structures within a few hours, with comparable labour to a tented structure.
• Insulating: the concrete shell has good thermal properties and can be covered in earth or snow for increased insulation.
• Durable: far more durable than tenting with a minimum design life of 10 years.
• Secure: provides a level of security not possible with soft skinned structures, protecting stores and equipment.
• Sterile: can be delivered sterile; allowing previously impossible surgical procedures to be performed in situ from day one of a crisis.
• Strong: the low mass and fibre matrix locked inside the concrete, gives the structure good earthquake performance. The compressive structure means it can also be covered with sand bags, earth etc. to provide protection against shrapnel.
• Semi-Permanent: provides all the benefits of a permanent structure without the associated costs and time delays.
How Concrete Canvas Works
CCS is a rapidly deployable hardened shelter that requires only water and air for construction. It can be deployed by one person without any training in under 40 minutes and is ready to use in 12 hours.
The key to CCS is the use of inflation to create a surface that is optimised for compressive loading. This allows thin walled concrete structures to be formed which are both robust and lightweight.
CCS consists of a cement impregnated fabric (Concrete Cloth) bonded to the outer surface of an inflatable plastic inner. It forms a Nissen-hut shaped structure with over 25 m2 of floor space, the technology can be scaled to provide larger structures, a 50m2 shelter is currently under development. The stages of deployment are as follows:Delivery
CCS comes delivered folded in a sealed plastic sack. The dry weight is 500kg, light enough to be transported on a pick-up truck or light aircraft.
Hydration
The sack is positioned and filled with water . The volume of the sack controls the water: cement ratio eliminating water measurement. The bag is then left for 15 minutes while the cement hydrates, this is aided by the fibre matrix which wicks water into the cement. Once hydrated, the sack is cut along its seams it then forms part of the ground sheet. Deployment is done at dusk to avoid over drying the cement.
Inflation
The structure is unfolded to form the shelter's footprint. A battery driven fan is activated and inflates the plastic inner to lift the structure until it is self supporting.
Setting
The Concrete Cloth cures in the shape of the inflated inner and twelve hours later the structure is ready to use. Doors and ventilation holes are left with no concrete cloth bonded to the plastic skin this allows access points to be easily cut from the inner once the cement has dried.
The fibres of the fabric form a coherent fibre matrix within the concrete providing tensile reinforcement and helping prevent crack propagation. This greatly improves the composite strength of the shelter giving the structure a design life of over ten years.
The structure can withstand a very high distributed compressive load enabling earth berming by piling sandbags, earth or snow on top. This gives the shelter excellent thermal properties and can provide protection against shrapnel, blasts and small arms.
Once CCS has fulfilled its primary application as an emergency shelter, it is highly likely that a secondary use would be found for the structure such as agricultural storage and accommodation. CCS can be demolished using basic tools. The thin walled structure has a very low mass, leaving little material for disposal.The structure is designed as part of a modular system; units can be easily linked together enabling the space to be tailored to the application.
The first Concrete Canvas Shelter is designed as a generic structure with initial uses as a field office, accommodation and for small scale secure storage. Future product developments include specialist medical variants. The technology can be scaled up to create much larger shelters which would be well suited to applications such as food and equipment storage.
Development
Concrete Canvas Technology was set up in August 2005 to develop the Concrete Canvas Shelter. In April 2006 the company secured first round equity funding and a DTI grant for Research and Development from the East Midlands Development Agency.
The Concrete Canvas Shelter has been enabled by the development of a core material technology in Concrete Cloth, a cement impregnated fabric that enables thin shell forms to be created quickly and easily. There are multiple spin out applications for Concrete Cloth in the construction and development sector.
Contact
info@concretecanvas.co.uk
