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AI for American-produced cement and concrete

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Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#41

Post by MisterTea »

Animats wrote: post #28

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…

On-site, before pouring, they use the slump test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_slump_test

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

ortusdux wrote: post #15

Tangentially related, but there is a new generation of trucks that mix the concrete on-site. They can output small batches and change the mix on the fly. They solve a lot of headaches! https://cementech.com/volumetric-technology/

Concrete mixer trucks are not new at all actually, they've been around for a long time.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#43

Post by richwater »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
ortusdux wrote: post #15

Tangentially related, but there is a new generation of trucks that mix the concrete on-site. They can output small batches and change the mix on the fly. They solve a lot of headaches! https://cementech.com/volumetric-technology/

Concrete mixer trucks are not new at all actually, they've been around for a long time.

Traditional trucks pick up cement from a facility and rotate it to keep it from setting. They don't mix it on the fly. Any extra is considered waste is poured out.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#44

Post by themafia »

harimau777 wrote: post #32
Animats wrote: post #28

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…

I'm surprised the ratios for a given situation isn't standardized by now. Is it just people cutting corners?

When you're making tons of something process variations get magnified.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#45

Post by sidewndr46 »

MisterTea wrote: post #41
Animats wrote: post #28

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…

On-site, before pouring, they use the slump test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_slump_test

Glad to see someone pointed this out. The test consists of a bucket, plywood board & a stopwatch.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#46

Post by m4rkuskk »

ortusdux wrote: post #15

Tangentially related, but there is a new generation of trucks that mix the concrete on-site. They can output small batches and change the mix on the fly. They solve a lot of headaches! https://cementech.com/volumetric-technology/

This may work on a small scale, not in most commercial use cases. A typical deck pour (400cy) will pour at 70-80cy/hr. you got 9-10cy/truck. Meaning you have 7 to 8 minutes to back in the truck, empty it into the hopper and leave. You barely have time to add water to the mix. Most high-volume concrete plants are "dry-batch", which means all the ingredients get dumped into the drum and the concrete will get mixed while driving to the project site. Also, changing mixes on the fly will not "fly". No one is going to authorize the adjustment, because what happens when the mix doesn't meet specs... It will need to get chipped out.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#47

Post by k33n »

AngryData wrote: post #10

Jesus I hope they do proper testing for these experimental mixes and don't trust whatever random garbage AI decides you should mix in. This is exactly the kind of thing AI is absolutely terrible at because it has no logical skills or direct experience or ability to test it. If your AI coded stuff goes belly up, you get to try again. If your multi million dollar cement foundation turns out to be sub-par, thats multi m…

AI isn’t just LLMs.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#49

Post by scythe »

The website talks about making cement, but only describes making concrete. Making concrete involves mixing cement and fillers with water under controlled conditions. Making cement involves heating calcium carbonates and oxides with silicon dioxide or calcium silicate to form alite at a temperature of (so far as we understand) no less than 1250 C. Usually this is done with fossil fuels and any impurities in the raw materials (which are cost-constrained) go up the flue, making cement plants rather polluting. Carbon dioxide is a nearly inevitable byproduct (CaCO3 + SiO2 >> CaSiO3 + CO2) and is either captured at source (not implemented at most facilities) or released.

There is plenty of room for improvement in cement production. I'm not sure exactly how to apply AI to it but I guess I was hoping for more than this. If we are going to have the infrastructure renaissance that keeps being talked up by reformists of various stripes, we need more cement.

South America is also a surprising laggard in cement production, which is odd considering they have the materials and they need the roads. I think that environmental concerns and a continental aversion to coal might contribute.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#50

Post by romaniv »

woah wrote: post #27
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #9

> As a result, producers need a way to rapidly explore and validate new formulations without spending months in the lab. How do you bypass the normal process of pouring test articles and testing them months and years after cure? This is fundamentally a research activity that needs to conduct verifiable science. Not something you can guess at with an LLM.

Somebody needs to coin a new term for the scattershot zero-thought AI griping that is pervasive in online comments these days. Meatslop? Obviously it's going to be more productive for a manufacturer to do a years-long curing test on 100 likely candidates instead of 100 random mixes. They obviously already screen candidates through traditional methods, but if this AI technique improves accuracy, all the better.

The current strategy of the AI hype machine is to exhaust people's reserves of attention by presenting a never-ending stream of hard-to-verify "positive" claims. It's Gish Gallop done on the Internet scale with a never-ending parade of tech influencers, proxy "journalists" and low-value accounts. The whole strategy aims for saturation and demoralized acceptance.

It's no surprise that people readjust their immediate reactions by expressing hostility and skepticism about anything AI-related without spending much time on analysis. In fact, it's an entirely rational repones.

Complaining about it without acknowledging the larger picture is disingenuous.

In this particular case, using the term "machine learning" would likely avoid the immediate negative reaction.

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