In times when the living space in all major cities is becoming ever more limited, architects, designers
and municipalities are discovering the living space
on the water whether it is a river or a coast. Yes, at
sea there are also plots and designs for floating
giant leisure facilities and living space.
These floating homes, hotels or leisure facilities are
designed to be sustainable and environmentally
friendly in terms of energy, water and waste
management.
Traditionally, floating homes are based on hulls of
various designs and materials as well as on existing
pontoon constructions.
Most metal or plastic hulls are used.
It has almost completely forgotten a very old and
proven technology in ship hull construction, the
Ferrocement.
Unfortunately, modern boat designers and designers
have not realized that concrete technology has
changed dramatically in the last twenty years.
UHPC Ultra High Performance Concrete materials
have long replaced industry standard concrete,
plastics and metals with success.
concrete hulls. Concrete hulls had advantages in the
past but also a lot of disadvantages. Older boat
builders may remember that they have made sleek
sailing yacht and motorboat hulls out of concrete
and still some of these yachts are sailing the seas
today.
UHPC products have been used in the offshore and
many other industries for decades, under the
toughest temperature, wear and corrosion conditions.
In architecture, UHPC is used for high-strength and
extremely thin structures. UHPC is already much
more environmentally friendly in processing than
previous plastic, glass fiber and metal processing.
Houseboats can be constructed entirely from
prefabricated UHPC hull and structures. Prefabricated
elements made of UHPC can be manufactured precisely
down to a fraction of a milimeter.
The advantage during processing is
- Low to no dust
- No hazardous raw materials
- No filtering or suction systems are necessary
- No odor nuisance
- No hazardous waste
- Casting
- Spraying
Most of the time it is possible to use glassfiber or
ceramic fiber reinforcement also as a construction
structure it is possible to use glassfiber or ceramic
fiber mesh.
Here UHPC offers ship builder and ship designer new
opportunities in the future.
The advantages of UHPC ship structures are:
- Over 70% of the nominal strength is reached
48 hours after spraying or casting
- Very smooth surfaces can be achieved without complex
grinding work
- Anti-fouling painting is not necessary - The life time surpasses that of all other marine materials
several times
- Wall thicknesses of 10 mm or more are possible
depending on the crosstalk and load
- An extremely high compressive and tensile strength
compared to standard concrete
- Extremely corrosion resistant- Extremely temperature resistant
- Easy to work with
- Use of fiberglass and ceramic fiber reinforcement.
- Metallic reinforcement is not necessary
- Any body geometry and size can be made
- We can combine UHPC concrete with special thermic
insulation products
- Resistant to environmental pollution - High mechanical load capacity
- Shortly we will introduce a UHPC material that is
unsinkable. We poured a big cube without a cavity
and it floated. We knocked out parts of the cube and
all parts swam.
At the moment we are also testing whether it is possible
to produce complete hull and superstructure constructions
in a special 3D printing process
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