Saturday, July 30, 2005

Buildings of the new age

Buildings for the new age.

Every one knows what a printer does. How would it be if the ink in the printer is replaced with glue or fast setting cement..?

Yes the new era of robotic construction is in the verge of commencing.

Giant robots when fed with liquid cement would build walls just as a printer prints a line. For a printer a circle is no way different form a rectangle. Thus arched features which are a symbol of art and complexity can now be simplified to a mathematical equation and built a computer and a robot.

A foresight

This robot when prototyped, would have applications right form building cheap extremely fast houses/huts for the tsunami affected to
Building signal towers in Mars.

This idea has been materialized by Prof. Behrokh Khoshnevis an engineering professor form the University of California.
The robot is named ‘Contour Crafter’. It builds structure layer by layer moving at the speed of 4 inches per second.

Accounting noise pollution


As we revolutionize, our needs, usage and our exhausts increase. Hence the word pollution comes into the scene. It becomes an absolute necessity for cosmopolitan cities to analyze, monitor and mitigate the impact of noise pollution.

This article discusses the effect and the possible solution for the city of Paris

The data.
26 million microphones installed at every corner of the cyber city gives enormous acoustic data. With other parameters like volume and variety of traffic in about 1000 miles of roads, size, shape and acoustic property of the buildings, the construction material used for roads a computer equipped with a Geographical Information System utilizes this voluminous data to pattern the city’s Day Night Level (DNL) of noise pollution.

The analysis provided the following results

The pattern of the city acts like a sound amplifier. Sound flows like running water (as shown by the arrow marks) to the center resulting in extremely loud and intolerable noise levels.

Express roads that carry 1.2 million vehicles a day around the city are the prime source of noise pollution. Hence abatement walls were built on either side of the roads to protect the city.

7 % of the population is regularly exposed to noise of intensity more than 70 decibels. This is like hearing the noise form a vacuum cleaner for 16 hours.

Sound Throwers

This is my idealogical article..

Frequency attenuation
This is a phenomenon by which an ultrasonic mechanical wave loses its energy stored in the form of frequency shift when it travels long distances.
Thus an ultrasonic wave after traveling long distance looses a considerable amount of energy through frequency attenuation would fall in the audible range.

This concept is similar to how the amplitude of sound waves gets attenuated when it travels long distances.

Applications

A musical in the audible range encrypted in the ultrasonic band, could be transmitted just like a sound wave to a long distance. There it naturally reduces to audible range.
Thus without the need for a receiving station or a speaker, sound can be transported.
It would appear as is sound coming from nowhere.