Posted on 05/25/2022 2:38:47 PM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
A new Chinese dam would become the world’s tallest 3D-printed structure. Engineers believe they can build the dam within two years while eliminating the need for human laborers at the dam site. Artificial intelligence will control unmanned machinery to construct the overall structure.
Chinese engineers will take the ideas of a research paper and turn it into the world’s largest 3D-printed project. Within two years, officials behind this project want to fully automate the unmanned construction of a 590-foot-tall dam on the Tibetan Plateau to build the Yangqu hydropower plant—completely with robots.
The paper, published last month in the Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology), laid out the plans for the dam, as first reported in the South China Morning Post.
Researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing explain the backbone of automation for the planned Yellow River dam that will eventually offer nearly five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.
But it’s hard to tell what’s more ambitious: the fact that the researchers plan to turn a dam site into effectively a massive 3D-printing project, or that through every step of the process the project eliminates human workers as they go fully robotic.
(Excerpt) Read more at strangesounds.org ...
They will know pretty soon whether it works or not.
If it works it will be a huge success.
If it doesn’t work there will be fewer people to feed which to them is also a success.
It’s a win/win for the Chicoms no matter what!
As a former project engineer,
I can tell you people are a pain in the ass.
However a Dam is a rather one of a kind thing.
Not like cranking out 100,000 of the same kind of Toyota
car.
Interesting to see if they can pull it off.
I’m not opposed to them doing this but NIMBY.
How is their Three Gorges Dam holding up?
What could possybli go wrong?
China has a shortage of everything except people. They do not even bother to make booster stages steerable on their rocketry. If one lands in a populated area, just too bad, so sad! Clean up mess, move on.
I don’t know if I would call it “3D printing,” though. Sounds like more conventional construction techniques, just using AI-controlled equipment. I was expecting a giant concrete-extruding boom of some sort.
Also, this is possible in part because the Chicoms don’t have to negotiate with labor unions.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
If something goes wrong, you adjust your plans and build it again. For the ruling class, people were cheap in the 20th century. I suspect we are soon going to find out they are cheaper in the 21st century.
A beaver and a fox are sitting at the base of the Hoover dam looking up. The beaver remarks, “I didn’t build it but it was based on a concept of mine.”
So will their quality control be better or worse than typical Chinese construction?
Thomas Edison invented the “continuous pour” concrete house. He only built two small structures for himself. He did build numerous “mostly” concrete houses elsewhere.
I used to live just up the road from his cement factory out in rural NJ. The old guy living next to me had worked for “Tommy”. Pretty cool to have known a guy that knew Thomas Edison!
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/thomas-edisons-forgotten-passion.html
“The object of my invention is to construct a building of a cement mixture by a single molding operation,” reads his patent application. “All its parts, including the sides, roofs, partitions, bath tubs, floors, etc., being formed of an integral mass of a cement mixture. This invention is applicable to buildings of any sort, but I contemplate its use particularly for the construction of dwellings, in which the stairs, mantels, ornamental ceilings and other interior decorations and fixtures may all be formed in the same molding operation and integral with the house itself. The house thus made is practically indestructible.”
Well, weak Chinese concrete doesn't care if it is manufactured and laid by humans or AI. It's still shitty Chinese-made concrete.
3 Gorges will eventually be a victim of its own success, it altered so much riparian flow that a 100-year rain event, just a simple Theta-E like the Waverly NC 2021 flash flood (21 inches in 24 hours), stuck just west pf the dam for a day, will top 200 metres at +/-100,000m/s and the center will pop like a pimple.
The Yangqu Dam is in a less-favorable position for a convergence disaster but is in a better location for another trigger -- a fast melt from a massive early-winter snow pileup followed quickly by monsoon winter rains, like The Great Flood of 1937 on the Ohio -- a monster flood that simply puts the dam under water for a week until the Yangqu cheap concrete gives way completely. Buh-bye to every confucian nimrod for 75 miles downstream.
Are the robots programmed to divert shipments and to substitute substandard materials? The inevitable future of AI.
It has been holding up rather well from what I can see.
drama that it is letting go has been unfounded.
Frankly, my dear,...
How much cardboard filler will they use and how substandard will the other materials be. Winner of the contract will the one who pays the most in bribes and bids the lowest, provided the company has the right Party connections and largest kick back to Party officials.
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