Have the worlds biggest super computers ever been used to try to figure out new concrete mixtures for roads/buildings?

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

This might be an eye opener. Sometimes its brutally simple, or a matter of trade offs:

Wood vs. Concrete in Construction: Pros and Cons of Each

Wood is lighter and is easy to work with, long-lasting, and results in less thermal bridging. Concrete, on the other hand, allows for the design of resilient and robust buildings.

www.builderspace.com

Note comments on engineered wood. Composites. Etc.

If you are curious about new materials/composites studies:

Materials science - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Rest assured simulations are used and ran on supercomputers for the above!



Diminishing returns might also fit on this whole perception of the world. Maybe, just maybe... we are reaching a point where progress in one area counters the progress in another. Where R&D now serves the final few % of progress thats still left, making it progressively less attractive to keep moving forward. Look at CPU and semicon nodes... its getting borderline retarded for those few extra percent of perf or power use. Marketing carries that now, to keep us buying, but ten year old chips work just the same for most. The real problem is that we keep buying, wanting more. We have been conditioned that way for generations, cradle to grave. Its not strange every company is caught up in the same rat race.

When we collectively start realizing and acting upon 'enough is enough', is the moment we can enforce systemic change to hypercapitalism that is way past expiration date. The new keyword I think is not growth, but sustainability alongside much slower progress. We need to slow down and do less of everything, refine what we have and start talking about global management of growth and decline.

This requires a less competitive and more collaborative approach. .... .... Yeah.

I dunno, if we solved nuclear fusion we would be energy secure ,so advancing fast ,might also be a way out of over using resources.

 

[Vayra86]

I dunno, if we solved nuclear fusion we would be energy secure ,so advancing fast ,might also be a way out of over using resources.

So far advancing fast has only been an enabler for growth and making the world and our heads spin ever faster. If you dont change the system feeding progress, you wont change a thing. We have several thousand years of evidence. And since the Industrial revolution, fossil has turned our growth into a near-exponential affair - much like a cancer or a virus. It cannot last, and it evidently doesnt

 

[mb194dc]

It should be humbling for us that Roman lime cement is much more durable, especially in the presence of sea water, than anything we've been able to come up with!

As for super computers, someone needs to program all the properties of the various parts in and its very difficult or impossible to do that.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

So far advancing fast has only been an enabler for growth and making the world and our heads spin ever faster. If you dont change the system feeding progress, you wont change a thing. We have several thousand years of evidence. And since the Industrial revolution, fossil has turned our growth into a near-exponential affair - much like a cancer or a virus. It cannot last, and it evidently doesnt

Most modernized nation's are actually looking at population shrinkage over the next few decades, people learn, people are also varied, some are doing more to change the future via science than others realise.
I get your points though, I am definitely a glass is half full, we can think our way out of issues kind of person.
But enough of that, just looking at materials science, others have posted, we largely did things in stupid ways because that's All we knew, and as people we were smashing stones together for a long time, were moving away from legacy, crap ways of doing things.

 

[R-T-B]

So far advancing fast has only been an enabler for growth and making the world and our heads spin ever faster. If you dont change the system feeding progress, you wont change a thing. We have several thousand years of evidence. And since the Industrial revolution, fossil has turned our growth into a near-exponential affair - much like a cancer or a virus. It cannot last, and it evidently doesnt

You thought bitcoin was Tulip mania, ha.

Now it's apparent to me: We are the tulips.

 

[seth1911]

70% of the super computers are beeing in use to simulated weapons for useless theoretical atomic wars.

In the US there is the use since nearly 50 years for that and since 50 years the computers say if the US and Russia starts a Atomic war the world is over.
I think the US wants a Super Computer who say no the world isnt over only the US wins.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

70% of the super computers are beeing in use to simulated weapons for useless theoretical atomic wars.

In the US there is the use since nearly 50 years for that and since 50 years the computers say if the US and Russia starts a Atomic war the world is over.
I think the US wants a Super Computer who say no the world isnt over only the US wins.

Slightly neg stance there
I looked about for usage stats, there are none.
So what are you finding that points to 70% simulated weapons use, I don't see that as realistic now, this isn't 1940.

 

[R-T-B]

Slightly neg stance there
I looked about for usage stats, there are none.
So what are you finding that points to 70% simulated weapons use, I don't see that as realistic now, this isn't 1940.

Yeah I find that super damn incredibly hard to believe... Smells like those facts came from somewhere other than fact town.

 

[Space Lynx]

concrete wouldn't even be needed so much if we went to a hyperloop based transport system. semi-truckers, EV semi's not needed at all, cargo would be put into pre-programmed modules to go to a certain destination. of course a complete hyperloop infrastructure would require society starting from the ground up and abandoning everything else overnight, which humans are unwilling to do. so humans will instead have mass famine when the entire system collapses due to climate weather pattern shifts (or we run out of oil and lithium which will happen eventually). so predictable... pathetically so. as I always say, capable of so much, yet so little.

 

[Vayra86]

70% of the super computers are beeing in use to simulated weapons for useless theoretical atomic wars.

In the US there is the use since nearly 50 years for that and since 50 years the computers say if the US and Russia starts a Atomic war the world is over.
I think the US wants a Super Computer who say no the world isnt over only the US wins.

WarGames - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Old news bruh

 

[Space Lynx]

Imagine this, United States 1900's, coming out of railroad industry and into car industry, before the great expansion of the highway system... imagine if we did this instead... and each person eventually had their own "module" and semi trucking never even existing, cargo is easy and pollution free with companies having their own modules... everything protected from entropy thanks to the advanced plastic...

I know it will never happen, but if one were building a society from a clean slate, I'd say this is the answer... then perhaps Earth's other resources could be used to figure out new ways of becoming a interstellar species before we either A) run out of resources B) collapse in ourselves for various reasons C) climate change destroys us

 

[Space Lynx]

Meta AI and university researchers discover stronger, more carbon-friendly concrete formulas

The Meta team worked with Professors Lav Varshney and Nishant Garg from the University of Illinois to conduct the initial model's training using the Concrete Compressive Strength...

www.techspot.com

looks like my my topic creation was ahead of the game after all... @W1zzard I laughed when I saw this article headline...

glad to see this progress.

sorry to resurrect an old topic, but the link is spot on with my original topic inquiry.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

American Concrete Institute

The American Concrete Institute (ACI) is a leading authority and resource worldwide for the development and distribution of consensus-based standards, technical resources, educational programs, certification programs, and proven expertise for individuals and organizations involved in concrete...

www.concrete.org

specifically

ACI Materials Journal

Learn more about the ACI Materials Journal here – subscribe, search past issues, become a journal author, or become a technical paper reviewer.

www.concrete.org

DoE/NIST have likely committed some compute power to the problem and those results published in that paper.

 

[Space Lynx]

Ancient Roman concrete could self-heal thanks to “hot mixing” with quicklime

Mysterious lime clasts, dismissed as defects, turn out to serve a useful purpose.

arstechnica.com

 

[Shihab]

Ancient Roman concrete could self-heal thanks to “hot mixing” with quicklime

Mysterious lime clasts, dismissed as defects, turn out to serve a useful purpose.

arstechnica.com

So many sing the virtues of [survivor-bias laden] ancient construction materials/techniques.
So few consider how horribly these materials/techniques would scale given modern demands (if they could satisfy it at all).

 

[Vario]

The field you are looking at is called Computational Materials Science.

 

[Squared]

Climate and weather modeling need a supercomputer because they model what we understand well but can't predict because it involves a near-infinite number of moving parts.

An AI might not need a supercomputer to guess at some new material choices.

But compressive strength is only part of the problem. To understand how long road concrete will last, you have to know how it'll interact with constant changes in stress as vehicles drive over it, temperature changes which caused it to expand and shrink, and materials like salt and water which can corrode the rebar and cause it to expand. In northern regions the biggest cause of failure is water freezing in cracks, which have to be there since the concrete will expand in the heat. We can model all this in a computer but modeling it won't necessarily result in finding a new solution. And it probably won't require a big supercomputer, as the number of parts at play is a lot smaller than in a climate or weather model.

 

[thesmokingman]

Well, think of it along these terms:

1) Don't you think that if we could cure cancer/diabetes/alzheimers or any number of other serious illnesses, we would have ? We COULD have, but then big pharma would stand to lose gazillions of $$, and we can't have that now, can we ?

2) We COULD have had electric cars/trucks/planes ect 40+ years ago, but the petrol czars and car makers would have also lost gazillions of $$ too, and we surely can't have that now can we ?

Soooo, coming up with some super-duper, eco-friendly road surface materials would put a hurtin on many other big name industries, therefore those options will go unutilized, at least until it becomes absolutely necessary, and the above mentioned industries can find a way to profit from it......

suks but it's the truth

2) This is real, GM forced all EV1 cars to be recovered and destroyed. That's how bad big oil is. However, someone did eventually develop the EV to a point of ubiquity and it was a helluva ramp up, but the point I'm making is while they were doing this the rest of us laughed at them. We're lucky that company from Fremont survived but let's be real here the world of haters and skeptics did not make it easy, so we're partly to blame as well.

Tesla (TSLA) IPO: 6 Reasons Why I Wouldn't Touch It

Just over a year ago, Tesla was using advance down-payment orders for its $109K electric Roadster to keep the company afloat. A lot has changed since then, but not as much as you'd think, given today's $250 million IPO. Can you say irrational exuberance? Dot-com bubble?

www.cbsnews.com

^^same reasons still exist today lmao

 

[Vario]

Climate and weather modeling need a supercomputer because they model what we understand well but can't predict because it involves a near-infinite number of moving parts.

An AI might not need a supercomputer to guess at some new material choices.

But compressive strength is only part of the problem. To understand how long road concrete will last, you have to know how it'll interact with constant changes in stress as vehicles drive over it, temperature changes which caused it to expand and shrink, and materials like salt and water which can corrode the rebar and cause it to expand. In northern regions the biggest cause of failure is water freezing in cracks, which have to be there since the concrete will expand in the heat. We can model all this in a computer but modeling it won't necessarily result in finding a new solution. And it probably won't require a big supercomputer, as the number of parts at play is a lot smaller than in a climate or weather model.

One benefit of supercomputers is you can run a lot of experiments simultaneously simulate various combinations and permutations of different materials, allowing a big data approach to identify novel materials.

A similar approach is done with computational biochemistry for novel drug design by changing different substituent groups on a molecule and simulating the effect of the change on the molecules reactivity. Supercomputers allow you to work at large scale.

 

[Space Lynx]

I watched Jensen (CEO of Nvidia) speak at a conference recently and he mentioned how the end goal for AI is to have drop and plug in systems that can be finely tuned for one thing or another, he gave the example of like medicine researchers fine tuning a AI computer specifically for that RnD... and it got me thinking about this topic again. I bet if enough people were motivated and fine tuned a super AI well enough it could help us figure our a better way to develop a new concrete or road material in general that doesn't need replaced so often.

The future looks interesting regardless with this AI surge... Jensen also talked about AI helped develop the H100 which now develops other AI... so we are seeing compounding interest/snowball effect occurring with progress... I think in the next ten years the world is going to look very very different...

 

[Shihab]

The only way AI would help in this scenario is if you gave it limbs and let it run labs and pilot projects

 

[ShiBDiB]

climate neutrality will become the main focus.

Yes yes, when I think of structural integrity and long lasting material it being climate neutral is a TOP priority.

What happened to Germany that they went so backwards. Abandoning the true climate friendly power generation for coal, "climate neutral" concrete, what's next?

 

[gurusmi]

... What happened to Germany that they went so backwards. Abandoning the true climate friendly power generation for coal, "climate neutral" concrete, what's next?

Money makes the world go round.

With a high inflation, highest taxes and low income there is no money for climate extras.I you have politicians who calculate their budget like shysters then you won't have money to support. In germany the workers want to work 32hrs per week with keeping the full salary.

 

[R-T-B]

So many sing the virtues of [survivor-bias laden] ancient construction materials/techniques.
So few consider how horribly these materials/techniques would scale given modern demands (if they could satisfy it at all).

I think if you drove a couple SUV type cars and big rig's over those old roman roads the miracle of their survival would tarnish quickly.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I...am astonished that people don't understand the difference between engineering, experimentation, and modelling sometimes. It is fun to discuss, so please forgive me the diversion.


Folding at home is taking known items, modeling them, and reverse engineering their structures with finite rules. It's modelling complex systems...not developing new stuff. As such it's only useful for modelling and thereby extrapolating data from. Once you get that protein structure mapped you still need it to do something.

Experimentation is defining those rules of modelling, by defining processes. This seems to be what the OP was actually asking about years ago. The problem is that the final structure of a thing can be greatly influenced by how it's processed. Others cited Roman concrete, which has had half a dozen "break throughs" in the last decade. Some of it was material input, other bits were processing, and some was simple testing. I find it funny that people think this is the realm of a supercomputer, where for the last several hundred years it's actually been patents and protected trade secrets which make things like brand name metal alloys and composites so valuable. Somebody out there tested thousands of alloys before settling on 1095 as "cabon steel" and even more before they started manipulating grain sizes and the like with annealing. All of which is so complex that modeling it stupid when a test is cheaper and faster.

Finally, engineering should be back of the bus. Engineers solve problems, using specified materials. They don't, largely, care if you find a 10% more carbon neutral solution, they care if the compressive strength remains the same. The problems usually stem from materials displacing design. Think some of the earliest porus parking lots getting destroyed by traffic in months rather than years.


So no, I don't think that supercomputers model concrete at any substantive level. It's not about money...it's about a black box with dozens of incompletely understood variables...which is a bad black box. It's also a black box whose output is devoid of meaning without finite goals...as anybody trying to sequester fly ash can make basically disintegrating foamy (but highly insulative) concrete or a surprisingly dense block with little more than process changes.