Coming Attractions

What does the future hold for construction?

By Sean Ryan

Builders on the moon, interior designs in space, robots on construction sites.

You might think it's science fiction. You'd be wrong.

And for those who maintain that the flights of fancy that once charged the imaginations of little kids are still nothing more than fanciful notions, we ask only that you look at the industry in which you live.

Did you really think 30 years ago that solar panels would become a mainstay on material lists? Did you actually believe that daylighting would be a word builders not only know but strive to attain as a means to promote their projects?

The future has a funny way of appearing without notice in construction. And for the industry, the future is now.

There really will be jobs in space for those equipped to handle the work. There really will be robots available to build houses.

So, now that you see the future, what will you do with the knowledge? If you ask us, we'd suggest you check costs on space suits.

Two scientists on an ice prospecting, lunar mission examine an ice-encrusted drill stem as they stand in the frigid, permanently shadowed part of a south polar region crater on the moon. This painting was used at a 1988 Houston-hosted conference titled, “Lunar Bases and Space Strategies of the 21st Century.” Images courtesy of NASA

Coming soon …
The future of construction

To the moon, builders

There’s a lot of room for new development on the moon.

It might seem impractical to think of the moon as a future growth market, but there is one potential owner with the necessary funds and a plan to hire lunar builders in about 15 years. NASA started putting out contracts for lunar construction early this summer.

“As we move on to the moon in the future, it’s not just going to be flags and footprints,” said John Wetzel, senior engineer at Applied Research Associates in South Royalton, Vt. “We’re going there to stay.”

Wetzel has a contract to develop for NASA a robot that will go to the moon to drill for samples and radar the ground for water and tunnels. The plan is to conduct survey and site analysis work for lunar projects.

After more than a decade of pre-planning, NASA is almost ready to send its builders to the moon. But it won’t be easy once they get there.

A lunar mining facility harvests oxygen from the resource-rich volcanic soil of the eastern Mare Serenitatis on the moon. This rendering represents lunar construction possibilities developed by NASA. Images courtesy of NASA

The first problem will be the moon’s soil. The top 4 inches of dirt is fine and powdery, like flour, and it’ll work its way into any exposed machine parts it can, said Leonard E. Bernold, a 20-year veteran of the moon project’s pre-planning and an associate professor of civil and construction engineering at North Carolina State University. There’s more moon dust under the top layer that’s been compacted by centuries of pressure and has reached 100 percent density. But there’s nothing holding it together.

“It’s so dense, it can’t get any denser,” Bernold said. “It’s not rock. It feels like rock, but as soon as you shake it, it becomes powder. That’s an awful thing to build on.”

Bernold said he thinks builders will have to set up rails instead of roads to transport equipment because the moon soil will crumble and swallow up any machinery operating on it.

Builders will need the rails to traffic building materials to the site. But some of the construction material might be waiting on the moon for builders to put to use. If the effort to create concrete from moon dust is successful, the rails could link construction sites to lunar concrete plants.

Soon excavation might also be tricky. The moon’s low grav-ity means dust could create a lingering cloud over the site if it gets shaken up, and Bernold predicted that workers could loosen the 100 percent dense soil using very small explosive caps and then dig it out in a contained area.

As commerce develops on the moon, tracts of the lunar surface are dedicated to various industries, such as lunar oxygen production, communications and helium 3 production. This rendering represents lunar construction possibilities developed by NASA. Images courtesy of NASA

“If you have some dust catapulted into the air, it’s going to be suspended forever,” Bernold said. “I can see people using explosives, and the whole moon turns into a dust ball.”

Bernold said he just laughs when he sees moon construction drawings with lunar builders using heavy equipment. Earth equipment is built heavy to provide traction and a counterweight to whatever it’s lifting, but it’s impractical on the moon because of cost and shipping and because the low gravity means neither a crane nor its payload would weigh much. He envisions moon builders using simple cable and pulley machines anchored in the ground and counterweighted with moon rocks.

Robots would do most of the physical labor because the moon’s zero atmosphere and 400-degree temperature shifts would make worker safety difficult. Builders could control the robots either by radio from Earth or from a spacecraft on the moon.

Coming soon …
The future of architecture

Astronaut Leroy Chiao, Expedition 10 commander and NASA ISS science officer, exercises on the Treadmill Vibration Isolation System in the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station. Photo courtesy of NASA

Trading spaces

Architects in the future will face many of the same design issues they deal with today.

They’ll worry about natural lighting, bathroom fixtures and meeting their clients’ needs.

But the natural light will be dangerous cosmic radiation. The toilets will include lap bars to ensure people don’t float away. The clients will be extraterrestrial humans.

“Space architecture is a whole new genre of architects, and there’s not many of us,” said Janis Huebner Connolly, co-investigator for architecture and human factors in NASA’s Habitability and Human Factors Office. “What we know is here and now. We have to take what we know works here and design it for a new environment.”

Huebner Connolly and Larry Toups, the project manager for NASA’s Exploration Systems Engineering Department, are laying the groundwork in the Johnson Space Center for what could become a future architecture market unlike any other.

Space architecture deals mainly with interior design, since designing the building or spacecraft shell is a job for astronautical engineers. It will be the architect’s job to create the comforts of home inside the scientific hardware needed for extraterrestrial living. The engineers will keep the body alive. The architects will keep the mind comfortable.

Cosmonaut Yury V. Usachev, commander of the second mission to the International Space Station, reclines on the wall of his private compartment. The two phone-booth-sized rooms reserved for the Russian crews also have a computer so they can receive e-mails from home. Photo courtesy of NASA

“With the advent of the space station, it was one of the first times we saw a need for NASA to have an architectural perspective to what we’re doing,” Toups said.

“These are still space vehicles, but there’s an interior environment that needs to encompass, as much as possible, architecture here on Earth.”

Windows are good examples. They can be deadly in space, but they offer people an important connection to Earth. They’re a weak spot in the ship’s hull, and that makes the structural engineers nervous. Beyond the cosmic radiation that will leak through, there’s also a slight chance that a solar flare could cook the spectator through the window.

At the same time, windows give a handful of humans isolated from their fellows on Earth a reassuring view of home.

“If you were interviewing a couple of structural engineers, they would say there is no way you pierce my pressure shell to put a window in there,” Huebner Connolly said. “They’re never very generous in size. We work hard at having them. They’re important. You bet they’re important.”

Because spacecraft have limited room, private quarters account for a minimum of the interior space. On the International Space Station, astronauts each get a phone booth-sized room of similar size. They personalize the rooms, and they sleep strapped to the wall.

“You should have equity, especially in something this small, and allow individuals to personalize it on their own,” Huebner Connolly said. “To carve out a little space to get away is really necessary.”

Russian cosmonaut Vladimir N. Dezhurov, flight engineer on the third expedition to the International Space Station, works in a temporary sleeping area in the station's Destiny Laboratory. Photo courtesy of NASA

The lack of gravity presents an opportunity to economize the use of space. Since there is no up or down in zero gravity, it’s possible to attach gear and equipment to all six sides of a room to save precious space. But astronauts complained when NASA tried it because they needed their house to have some kind of up-down orientation, Toups said.

“What we have found from crewmembers coming back is there is a preference for them to have a local horizontal and a local vertical,” he said. “When crews return and you get their responses, they are your client. They are your customer.”

NASA’s extraterrestrial bathrooms are smaller than the bedrooms, and Huebner Connolly said there isn’t much room for improving them. People in space will most likely wash with dried soap and a wet cloth, although she said they’re thinking about creating a sealed space for zero-gravity showering. She said showers are both physically and mentally refreshing on Earth, and they offer people in space what NASA calls a whole body cleansing.

But she said showers have more potential on the moon, where the slight gravity makes it more like an Earth shower. In space, astronauts hover in a room with floating spheres of water.

Toups said the need for space architecture will increase with time because humanity’s need for terrestrial luxuries will only grow as people move farther away from Earth.

“Today, they’re still very closely knitted to the Earth because you can look out your window and it’s right there,” Toups said. “When Earth becomes a small dot in the distance, as Mars is to us, you are going to have to provide more creature comforts.”

The Horn Mountain Spar facility floats in 5,423 feet of water about 100 miles southeast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. The $600 million drilling project is expected to take 150 million barrels of oil and gas from the ocean floor. Photo courtesy of U.S. Minerals Management Service

Coming soon … The future of engineering

Off the deep end

The 10,011-foot record for deepest underwater drilling won’t stand a chance against engineers of the future.

With a goal to bring untapped fossil fuel deposits into humanity’s grasp and broaden the ability to transport them to users, engineers will find ways to reach the mother lodes buried under deeper water.

As offshore-rig engineers increase their capabilities, contractors will increase their skill in laying pipelines to carry fuel from the oceans into developed areas.

In the last 20 years, the definition of deep in offshore drilling has shifted from 400 feet to 10,000 feet, said Charles Smith, a senior technical advisor for the U.S. Minerals Management Service Accident Investigation Board. Rigs going even deeper in the Gulf of Mexico could pull in 150,000 barrels of oil a day, compared to 10,000 for a good drilling platform in the 1970s.

“It’s a bigger cost with a lot more investment, but the returns are quite higher,” Smith said. “We’re approaching some great tasks and, with Mother Nature, every time you increase the depth, new technology is required. Mother Nature can be unforgiving.”

The Thunder Horse production platform processes up to 250,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas a day. Thunder Horse is expected to produce 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent in its Gulf of Mexico location. Photo courtesy of U.S. Minerals Management Service

Smith has watched the fixed offshore structure, which is supported by piles driven into the seabed, become obsolete because of platforms called spars, which are tethered to the sea floor and float like bobbers. The most radical idea for the future is to completely ditch the concept of surface structures.

Norway’s Ministry of Petroleum and Energy is working on a production facility that would be fixed to the sea floor and controlled from shore. By putting all the heavy equipment on the seabed, engineers would completely eliminate concerns that water currents, wind and storms would topple their surface platforms.

“That’s the whole purpose,” Smith said. “It’s really pushing the limits right now.”

The underwater facility would separate the oil and natural gas from sand and water and then ship the fuel to shore through long seabed pipelines, Smith said. In the Gulf of Mexico, the pipes would need to be heated because the Gulf’s bottom is covered with a layer of permafrost. Engineers would also steer pipes around seabed slopes, which could form underwater mudslides that would wipe out the structures.

In Alaska, Materials Management laid a pipe under the ocean floor to avoid rolling boulders that currents pushed into the pipelines.

The Nautilus holds the world record for deepest drill by a mobile drilling unit moored to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico with its 9,205-foot bore. Photo courtesy of U.S. Minerals Management Service

The pipelines that carry the refined fuel on land are also going to improve, and that’s where Hercules comes in. The horizontal directional drilling machine developed by Michels Directional Crossings, a division of Brownsville-based Michels Corp., can lay pipes underneath waterways or buildings without disruptive dredging or trenching, said Tim McGuire, vice president of Directional Crossings.

McGuire said Hercules holds the current record for a stand-alone crossing with a 7,400-foot-long, 20-inch diameter natural gas pipe built across the St. Lawrence River in 2003. He estimated that, through incremental improvements, Hercules could add another 9,000 or 10,000 feet to that record over the next 20 years.

The key to improving Hercules isn’t accuracy because it’s already accurate enough, McGuire said. Michels bridged the St. Lawrence by drilling from both shores and connecting the pipes in the middle. The future machine would likely have stronger motors that could top the 1.2 million pounds of thrust that Hercules sports today, he said.

While 7,400 feet is a long way, McGuire said Michels is already receiving demands from customers to surpass that.

“Every year, we think we’ve accomplished the limit, and then we break it again,” McGuire said. “It’s more evolutionary increases instead of a revolutionary jump.”

Coming soon … The future of equipment

Behrokh Khoshnevis, University of Southern California professor of systems engineering, stands next to a wall his Contour Crafting robot built. The machine's trowel has crafted walls where the imperfections were only 2 microns large. Photo courtesy of the University of Southern California

Can robots swim in the labor pool?

Construction robots will come in two basic varieties.

First will be the massive robots that integrate a number of different machines to independently erect a complete building. Second will be the robots that replace humans in doing single, repetitive tasks.

A future construction project will begin with single-task robots surveying the site and estimating how much work and how many materials will be needed for the job.

Automatic excavation robots will then prepare the site, clearing the way for larger automated building construction robots that will build the building. Trucks on automatic pilot will ensure the machines receive materials on schedule. Once the building is wrapped, single-task robots will go inside and do the finishing work and landscaping.

Twenty years ago, the people developing these robots figured that’s how things would be built in 2005, said Miroslaw Skibniewski, Purdue University professor of civil engineering, construction engineering and management, former president of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction and editor of the Automation in Construction research journal. Even though the IAARC has catalogued 76 tried-and-true construction robots, some of which are being used on construction sites in Japan, their U.S. application will have to wait.

“I hate to make an exact prediction because that is what we were doing 20 years ago,” Skibniewski said.

An automated construction future, just like the automated manufacturing present, will not eliminate the need for human workers, Skibniewski said. He estimated that fully automated construction systems can cut the cost of human labor by up to 80 percent.

Human construction workers of the future will need the same basic construction know-how they have today, but they’ll also need basic computer skills to operate and supervise the machines, Skibniewski said. Besides, he said, single-task robots will perform the repetitious tasks, such as painting, excavation or sandblasting, that aren’t ideal for humans.

The Contour Crafting construction robot builds a wall at the touch of a button. The machine dispenses construction materials through a nozzle attached to a trowel. Photo courtesy of the University of Southern California

“It enhances the status of the labor, and it makes the work easier,” he said. “Robots love work that’s repetitive and physically demanding but not necessarily intellectually demanding.”

Skibniewski predicted that, by making projects more affordable, robots could lead to an increase in construction activity.

One robot developed in America that could have just such an impact on the housing market is the Contour Crafting System, invented by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of systems engineering at the University of Southern California. He estimated a smaller machine would cost between $500,000 and $1 million and could build a 2,000-square-foot house in a day.

“I’m sure that the technology will take over,” Khoshnevis said. “I’m not really counting on the construction industry. I know they’re conservative and need to see it to believe it. I am going to make them believe it.”

Khoshnevis isn’t the only person in America expecting the industry to be slow in its acceptance of robots.

Despite the benefits of robots, contractors in America are slow to consider them because public competitive bidding makes them phobic about trying new technologies, said Professor Jeffrey Russell, chairman of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former student of Skibniewski. The industry’s reluctance to accept a new method of building could be a tougher problem than giving autonomous robots sensory capabilities or adapting human construction techniques to a new type of worker.

“Look around at our industry — it’s a low-tech industry, and it’s a fragmented industry,” Russell said. “We’re not like the Japanese. The thing the Japanese have that’s much different is their leadership understands the future belongs to those that have a technical edge. They’re going to go after our lunch.”

Robots don’t scare Lyle Balistreri, president of the Milwaukee Building and Construction Trades Council. He said he’s seen automation replace workers in other industries, just as he’s seen scissor-lifts replace workers who assembled scaffolding by hand when he was a kid in the trades. But, he said, America’s buildings are much less uniform than those in Japan, and, in that setting, robots won’t have such a universal use.

“There are just too many details that would have to be done individually by people in our industry,” Balistreri said. “I’m not too worried about robots. I’m more worried about people.”

Coming soon … The future of materials

Crews test a longer-living pavement mix developed at Iowa State University. Researchers at the university and Federal Highway Administration are working on ways to predict how long certain types of pavement can last. Photo courtesy of Center for Portland Cement Concrete Pavement Technology

Where rubber hits the road

In the future, highways will live almost as long as people do today.

Instead of retiring at 30, a concrete road will last at least 50 years and maybe 75. An asphalt surface, now dying at 18, could live to be 25 years old.

Those long lives mean that under current funding levels, the United States could afford to keep the vast majority of its freeways in good health, said Tom Cackler, director of the Center for Portland Cement Concrete Pavement Technology at Iowa State University.

It’s good timing because, as it stands now, the funding dedicated to road maintenance can’t keep up with maintenance needs. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials estimated that the U.S. needs to increase its public road funding by 42 percent to keep its roads in good condition.

“Assuming that the revenue stream stays where it’s at, what it will do is allow us to address more of the system,” Cackler said.

As time goes on, the roads will contain less actual cement in their surfaces because cement is becoming scarce, he said.

“Instead of just using ordinary Portland cement, we’re using a lot of waste products — fly ash, blast-furnace slag and that stuff,” Cackler said. “A lot of higher quality aggregates are scarcer, and as we use them up, they’ve become more precious. A lot of public agencies are trying to use them only on the high-use roads.”

As scarce aggregates fade away, researchers are realizing that the materials used as a replacement work better anyway, said Tom Harman, Material and Construction Team leader at the Federal Highway Administration Office of Research and Development.

Researchers in the Center for Portland Cement Concrete Pavement Technology brew up different concrete concoctions. The team is working toward a future where highways will be reconstructed only once a generation.

“The direction we’re being pushed is the way we should be going,” he said.

Researchers are experimenting with crumb rubber, for example, to produce a silent freeway that absorbs traffic noise and eliminates the need for highway sound barriers. The barriers cost at least $1 million per mile to build, Harman said.

But researchers are still perfecting the science of predicting how long a road could live and how often it would need repairs. Until people know how much it would cost to maintain a road for 75 years, it’ll be tough to predict how profitable longer life could be, said Joe Nestler, Wisconsin Department of Transportation chief of state
highway program development. The upfront construction costs will also be higher, he said, and, in the end, it could be cheaper just to build
two 30-year surfaces instead of one 75-year road.

“The trade-offs are what have to be weighed,” Nestler said. “I wouldn’t call it skepticism. Those things are attainable, but we have to look at the life-cycle cost.”