Teknoloji
Enjenyè Tech Vire Ayiti debri nan Resous
- Madi, Fevriye 08, 2011 8:54 AM
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Te Yon gwoup Georgia enjenyè Tech kalkile konnen kouman ou kapab fè sa anpil te panse te enposib - vire debri nan masiv tranbleman tè Ayiti a nan yon resous solid.
It's a scene hard for many watching around the world to imagine - a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti to its core.
Born in Haiti, Dr. Reginald Desroches, a Georgia Tech engineer, traveled back to his homeland in the aftermath. His goal - to assess whether the buildings were safe enough to be occupied.
"You'd be in neighborhoods where 95 percent of the buildings were completely flattened. Rubble everywhere. It was completely pancaked on top of each other where the roof was joining the floor. That was very common thing in Haiti," said Dr. Reginald Desroches
Dr. Desroches and his team found the concrete in Haiti to be not just inferior but extremely weak.
"You could just scratch the surface with your thumb or finger. It was like completely different from anything here in the U.S. I was amazed," said Georgia Tech graduate student Brett Holland.
Also amazing was the sheer amount of debris - about 20 million cubic yards of rubble. That would fill up the superdome five times. With very little landfill space on the island, government officials initially thought about dumping it into the ocean, but the Georgia Tech team were determined to find a way to recycle it.
They used samples, brought back in their suitcases, to test and come up with a mixture using the American concrete standards as a guide.
The concrete made in Haiti can easily be broken up with a common hammer. That's not something you are supposed to do with concrete. By using Haiti's natural resources they were able to turn the rubble into a stronger concrete.
"You'd use three proportions of the rubble, two cups of sand, 1 1/2 cups of water and one cup of cement. We found it was as strong as what we'd use in the U.S.," said
Before testing, Haiti's concrete had a compression strength of 1300 pound per square inch. The new recycled concrete is more than twice as strong. It's a process nearly anyone in Haiti can do themselves without the use of heavy machinery.
