Thu 30 Apr 2009
Liberator 2 Production Rate Calculations
Posted by Marcin
The basic design rationale for MicroTrac hydraulic pump (and engine) size requirements is the ability to power the Liberator 2 CEB press to the extent that it can produce 6 bricks per minute. See calculations. This indicates 360 bricks per hour, or about 3000 bricks per 8 hour work day. Wow. This involves a 2 person team, one person running the LifeTrac hybrid Soil Pulverizer, and the second person stacking bricks. This improves upon the 500 brick per 8 hour shift sustained production rate that we ordealed last year, with a typical 2 person team. We still got the CEB workshop addition built – under the worst possible conditions. It was a worthwhile experiment in that we now have a spacious workshop environment – and with a planned sCEB floor and other improvements, we will not complain. It’s time to move on to the Solar Village. Now seeking collaborators for design assistance.
For a replicable, resilient community, it helps to have building material production capacity for producing required materials on the order of days, as opposed to weeks. If we take the CEB workshop addition as a particular case from our experience, it would take us 2 days – instead of 2 weeks – to press the required bricks, with machines eliminating human fatigue.
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May 1st, 2009 at 8:32 am
Marcin,
Do you think sCEB’s will work for floors? Know of anyone who has tried this?
May 1st, 2009 at 9:14 am
Sure. It’s industry standard at Auroville, for example:
http://www.earth-auroville.com/index.php?nav=holistic&id1=2
Auram, their CEB machine, makes floor tiles as one of its options. They are stabilized with cement or lime.
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
So are you thinking up a way to add lime to fix the bricks problems? I cant remember where i read it the other day but someone was talkign about drywall being mostly lime?? If this is true this may be a cheap source of a material to grind up and use to mix in with the bricks.
Dont quote me on that tho hahaha
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Drywall is gypsum not lime.
May 6th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
6 bricks per minute in a vacuum. 4 would be a more resonable estimate, not bad for run 2
May 10th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
… slightly off-topic, but has anyone else seen this “giant CEB” machine, the EarthCo Megablock ?
http://www.earthcomegablock.com/index.htm
I am posting this because we should be thinking about variations in block size. For some applications, much larger blocks may be advantageous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Compressed_Earth_Blocks
May 11th, 2009 at 8:45 am
i looked into that. it extrudes the blocks and they are like 8′ long and like 2′ tall and 1′ wide building blocks. Its a huge machine. More for building huge buildings. But we may be able to think about it in the future in a mini size.