ARCHIMEDE INSTITUTE


OUR FIRST 'OPERA'

Thanks to a generous fund provided by Private Capital Inc. and it's owner, Ronald Smith (left on photo), the Archimede Institute has fully tested a series of small buildings that can be erected in a few hours. The one shown here is an aseptic field operating room that is air conditioned and can be hosed down clean inside and out. The heaviest component weighing in at 30 kilos, two nurses could theoretically put one up on their lunch break, to use a little Cajun exageration. The entire package can be air freighted in a small crate that fits in any air cargo hold.
Note: Photo taken on a hot day after a few Cajun beers. ;-) I'm the sober one on the right.
Jacques

The Rhombic Dodecahedral Geometry


(text from Wikipedia)
The rhombic dodecahedra honeycomb is a space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space. It is the Voronoi diagram of the face-centered cubic sphere-packing, which is believed to be the densest possible packing of equal spheres in ordinary space (see Kepler conjecture).

It consists of copies of a single cell, the rhombic dodecahedron. All faces are rhombs, with diagonals in the ratio 1:√2. Three cells meet at each edge. The honeycomb is thus cell-transitive, face-transitive and edge-transitive; but it is not vertex-transitive, as it has two kinds of vertex. The vertices with the obtuse rhombic face angles have 4 cells. The vertices with the acute rhombic face angles have 6 cells.

The rhombic dodecahedron can be twisted on one of its hexagonal cross-sections to form a trapezo-rhombic dodecahedron, which is the cell of a somewhat similar tessellation, the Voronoi diagram of hexagonal close-packing.

In plain English: If you took a can of peas, drained it and packed some of the peas tightly between your two cupped hands, you would obtain:




  • a bunch of peas each with twelve identical flat faces, parallellogram shaped
  • no void between each peas until you separate them
  • very messy hands.
  • The resulting shape is the strongest thing next to a sphere
  • It is arguably the strongest object you can create using flat surfaces



Hundred of houses built this way have been trhough terrible hurricanes and earthquakes,

SOLID GEOMETRICAL CHOICES FOR STRENGTH

This acrylic scale model built in 1979 was the inspiration for a 30 year effort in building stronger better prefabricated homes. The configuration variety provided by these identical panels, their angles of intersection providing 3 axis of resistance to lateral forces instead of 2, the multiple orientations of the views provided gave Poirier a rush he could not resist to build them for all these years. Since 1979, a few changes were brought about, the actual rhombic dodecahedron was actually squashed vertically, then some roofs were transformed into 6-side pyramids, but the essential merit of the shape remained intact as the panels and the shells were proven to be equal or more resistive than planned.
This merit is firstly the unusually high resistance to side loads. This diagram makes it easy to understand what makes this possible. Whatever the direction

THE ARCHIMEDE STORY, UPDATED


This 15-minute video was put together by the Institute to give a hint as to what the Archimede Solutions can look like. The first half brushes a wide historical perspective while the last half introduces the newer techniques adopted in our latest synthesis in Mexico. The reinforced concrete approach is being fully industrialized so as to both simplify and speed up the erection process. Along with our modular pods containing finished bathroom and electrical walls, we are thus providing true prefabrication having these 5 characteristics:
No other prefabricated system meets any more than 2 of of these 5, this at any price. We rightly describe ourselves as offering fully permanent housing and shelter from container-shipped components and local concrete.

NOTE:
We cannot show plant equipment, assembly methods, service core module, and finished components because these are currently part of the patent process, requiring that none of our ideas be published prior to full patent application. Associates and affiliated groups will be able to access these pages.