176
We Finally Know How Ancient Roman Concrete Was Able to Last Thousands of Years
(www.sciencealert.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
176 points (85.5% liked)
Technology
59377 readers
3850 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isn't titanium too rigid for this application though? I've worked with both for a mechanical application, and titanium has no flex, so stresses get passed in to other components.
I don't know, I'm no civil engineer. Any civvies wanna fill us in?
That could be. Maybe some alloy? Not sure
Aluminum then?
I'd say all the Civil engineers who continue to spec steel do it for well-established reasons.
Steel is just so hard to beat in so many applications. Even for the average road bicycle, surprisingly. Because steel can tolerate more flex than things like aluminum/titanium/carbon fiber. So other materials require different designs. In the end, the average street bike in steel or aluminum can often weigh the same, depending on the design choices (not specialized bikes, where different compromises are made).
Like so many things, when used as designed in concrete, steel is just fine, and I assume meets the cost, availability, industry knowledge, etc, goals.
Makes me think of "don't remove a fence until you know why it's there". Every year upcoming engineers do tests during their education. If a different material was a better choice, I'm sure a research arm of a university would present it.