Testing its Durability for City Building Approval
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Does anyone in the United States own a little dragon and would be willing to ship me a sample for further testing or has anyone conducted test to see its reliability?
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Your question needs further explanation. Do you want to test the little dragon or the celular concrete that can be created with it? AFAIK, the city building codes will approve based on engineering specifications that are already established. Mixing a batch of concrete could be done even by hand, and if it is in the proportions given by the engineering standards, then there is nothing left to test. The little dragon is just a machine, a mixer that is also prone to be misused if the person doing the mix do it wrong. I had sometimes 3 to 6 cubic yards of concrete delivered to me by Cemex(a big concrete company here in the USA) with the wrong psi, and had to send it back. The only thing that you could test for a city approval would be to create a few aircrete blocks with the exact mix ratio of aircrete that you plan to use on the whole building, and do a set of 4 to 6 test cylinders and send them to an engineering firm. They will compress test them at several intervals of time and will give you a report of the strengh, that you can present in your building plans to be approved. Testing a little dragon will tell you nothing, because the final mix depends completely of the operator, and it will tell the city approval nothing. They will only check whatever method the engineer stamped on the approval, and then an inspector or engineer might be present during the concrete pouring. Other than that, there is nothing to check about the equipment itself. When I get to that point, I am planning of engineering test some aircrete blocks for my own building approval and will be willing to share the results for the benefits of others, but I am in other projects now and that might take me some time. Hope this helps.
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sounds good Joe,,,, i had basicly the same question in regards to the strength of the aircrete,,, are you in the US? i am in southern california and am debating on this type dome or the shotcrete over rebar and air form done out of Italy, TX..... It seems that it may not stand the testing but I am barely looking into this from Domegaia..... hope you have a chance for more updates soon.....
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A Lot of your questions can be answered here. >>>> https://www.richway.com/construction-resources/mix-designs-and-economics.html#strength
You can make very strong aircrete but you will than lose insulation.
I'm starting the process of building a 40 foot dome in Colorado i'm having the floorplans modified now. I will show you the first iteration. After I get the second iteration back, based on a clay model I made. I will be moving on to structural engineering than final approval from the county. What I decided to do was have a 4" concrete shell made first, my structure. And add 8" of aircrete on top of the structural concrete. This was the best building method for me. I get the best of both.
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i certainly appreciate the information.... Did you take any formal training from Domegaia or monolithic dome Institute?? will you use an inflation type process for your first layer and shotcrete?? will you use the liner as water proofing or does the additional 8 inches of aircrete provide the water proofing you need??
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I did not get any training from anyone. I did buy the video from monolithic dome on how to build a dome. And are working on a new way of building a dome. That is why I did a small scale dome test first. I will be using a 40 foot dome air form. There will be two layers for water proofing the first is latex cement additive in the structural layer, the second is a water poof stucco over the aircrete.
