201–210 of 278 posts
There's been a one-brick-thick wavy wall off a busy road in Cambridge for at least fifty years: https://goo.gl/maps/sxTsPW71F317gwK88 It kept getting hit by cars until they finally installed a guard rail.
"Popularized in England" - maybe popularized, but such walls are by no means popular or common. "The county of Suffolk seems to be home to countless examples of these crinkle crankle walls. On freston.net you can find 100 wavy walls that have been documented and photographed." Although it's not explicitly said, let's suppose that every one of those wavy walls is in Suffolk. The population of the county is 761 350 - l…
I feel like everyone this far is missing something, or perhaps just I am. I understand that a wavy wall will be stronger than a straight wall of the same thickness, therefore if you need that additional strength it technically uses fewer bricks to reach it. That said, if the alternative is a 2 layer straight wall, is the wavy wall equally as strong? Or is it just stronger than the single layer wall? Without knowing a…
Well, tbf the article doesn’t even try to explain how wavy walls are stronger than straight ones, or how fewer bricks are needed.
This was a question I had students prove out. With the bending moment of inertia being related to the cube of the thickness for a flat plate, the maths trickles out very quickly.
This feels a bit like diet clickbait... "use fewer bricks than a straight wall"* *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length. My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design. Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
> these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall— without buttresses —would easily topple over. And what about a straight wall with buttresses? Can we make them just as sturdy with fewer bricks?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The religious group that funds it has a questionable relationship to science including and despite "Science" being in its name. (It was started as a 19th Century anti-hospital group. We'd consider them "proto-anti-vax" in today's concerns and terminology.) They may be unbiased in reporting the news, generally, but there's still concerns about their relationship to reporting science given their name and the known beli…
...being anti-hospital in the 19th century sounds fairly rational to me?
Would it be stronger for the same amount of bricks if it didn't have the inflection point where there is no curvature, and instead had intersecting arcs like: ︾︾︾︾ ?
My gut instinct is that the point where a wavy wall changes from curving one way to another is a slight weak point and perhaps an angle there would actually be stronger. Might be totally wrong.
The same reason is why my roof has corrugated metal sheeting, rather than plate. This was a question I had students prove out. With the bending moment of inertia being related to the cube of the thickness for a flat plate, the maths trickles out very quickly.