Japan Creates Earthquake-Proof Levitating House System 243
An anonymous reader writes "Japanese company Air Danshin Systems Inc. has developed an innovative system that levitates houses in the in the event of an earthquake to protect them from structural damage. When an earthquake hits, a sensor responds within one second by activating a compressor, which forces an incredible amount of air under the home, pushing the structure up and apart from its foundation. The air pressure can keep the home levitating up to 3cm from the shaking foundation below. In the wake of last year's Fukushima disaster the company is set to install the levitation system in 88 houses across Japan."
Re:Might be cheaper to just rebuild the house. (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends... housing ain't cheap in Japan, and getting a new one may be hellishly expensive when compared to keeping your old one from coming apart.
Also, what's easier, saving the house (and everything in it), or rebuilding from scratch? It's not just the cost of the house you have to keep in mind, but the cost of all the stuff in it, and the expense + time spent living out of a hotel room (or with relatives) until your house gets rebuilt.
Re:Might be cheaper to just rebuild the house. (Score:5, Insightful)
And with the added benefit of not being crushed to death by rubble in the process!
Re:Dumbest fucking idea evar (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Dumbest fucking idea evar (Score:5, Insightful)
Power often fails in earthquakes.....or does the system come with an instant start generator.
One likely possibility is that they keep a container of pre-compressed air on standby underneath the house. Then all the system has to do when the earthquake hits is open a valve to let the compressed air escape -- no power source necessary. (of course, this would mean you'd have to make trade-offs between container size, container pressure, and levitation duration... dunno if it would be practical or not)
Power Outage? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant [wikipedia.org] ):
"The reactor's emergency diesel generators and DC batteries, crucial components in helping keep the reactors cool in the event of a power loss, were located in the basements of the reactor turbine buildings. The reactor design plans provided by General Electric specified placing the generators and batteries in that location, but mid-level engineers working on the construction of the plant were concerned that this made the back up power systems vulnerable to flooding. TEPCO elected to strictly follow General Electric's design in the construction of the reactors."
The design basis for [the plant] for tsunamis was 5.7 meters. The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 40.5 metres.
Around 4.4 million households in northeastern Japan were left without electricity and 1.5 million without water.
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster [wikipedia.org], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami [wikipedia.org]
So say right that the power to the Air Danshin Systems Inc installation is taken out by an earthquake and there is no 'levitating' to be had? Aftershocks?
I doubt each installation would have its own generator and even if it did it would have to be left running in order to be able to kick in if power was lost.
Lessons learned, maybe not.
Re:Might be cheaper to just rebuild the house. (Score:5, Insightful)
But on the other hand, houses in San Francisco don't tend to substitute shoji screens for walls.
Re:Might be cheaper to just rebuild the house. (Score:5, Insightful)
Housing is very cheap in Japan (cheaply bought and cheaply built).
Land is expensive. Not housing.
The point here is not really to save the house, but saving the people inside.
Re:Dumbest fucking idea evar (Score:5, Insightful)
As an engineer that has to do with compressors fairly often (though mostly on paper), I think your idea is much more sensible than installing a compressor. Compressors are hellishly expensive, require regular and competent maintenance (which is also expensive), and are prone to failure (more so than, say, pumps or valves). And anyway, a compressor that can start up and fill that kind of volume in a second is just a pipe dream; the study in the FA probably had a ludicrously overdimensioned compressor idling, and if you have to ask for how much it costs to idle a compressor 24/7 for decades waiting for an earthquake, you can't afford it—that's before considering its noise and how it would make your house uninhabitable.
My bet, however, would be on something like airbag chemicals [wikipedia.org]. They react fast, the principle is well known and only needs to be scaled up. Compared to a valve, it is easier to build a fail-safe solution, and a large high-pressure air tanks will have all kinds of regulatory issues (for good reasons).
Re:Might be cheaper to just rebuild the house. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the 21st century here in Japan. Any shoji screens still in houses are usually decorative or a just to give a little visual privacy. We use real walls.We use real walls.
Not according to wikipedia, which says timber frames are popular.
Only on /. would someone, in a different country, try to use Wikipedia to disagree with the reality of someone who actually lives in the country in question. Also, "timber frame" does not mean what you apparently think it does. The majority of homes in the US (and many other countries) are also timber frame.
Re:Might be cheaper to just rebuild the house. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're unfortunately right about the expected lifespan of houses.
It doesn't have to be that way, though. Right now I'm renting a house that's 87 years old, and it would be nicer than any modern house if the landlord gave a crap. It's still structurally sound, the exterior is beautifully designed (if in need of a little TLC), and despite its exceedingly odd by modern standards floor plan, it's far more usable for actually living like a human being than most modern houses. Also, the fact that it's relatively small for the neighborhood means that we've got a much bigger yard for our dogs and garden than most of the rest of our street.
And this house is just a timber-frame with lathe and plaster on the inside and wood siding on the outside. I grew up in an old adobe house in rural New Mexico. It would be tough to say how old *that* house was, but I'd have to guess it was well over 100 years 20 years ago when I was a kid. I drove by it recently and it's been replastered and it has a new roof. It looks practically new. In England there are cob dwellings that are hundreds of years old. In Africa there are multi-story wattle and daub structures on rubble trench foundations that have been standing and occupied for thousands of years.
My childhood home was also much easier to work with than a lot of modern homes. All the plumbing and wiring was reasonably easy to access, and ran through conduits that went around the house on the exterior or pipes trenched around the outside of the foundation. My dad replumbed it and rewired the parts of it that weren't already to modern standards when my parents bought it. It cost him a few hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, one of my coworkers owns a house that's only about 20 years old in a big housing development, but she's already had to hire a whole crew to dig through the giant concrete slab that is under her living room to fix a leaky pipe, and she'll probably have to again. Some genius ran all the plumbing straight under the slab foundation when it was built, probably to save the $100 of extra pipe it would have taken to route it all around the house instead -- or to save the slight measure of fucking foresight it would have taken to just put the wet wall near the water and sewer hookups instead of on the opposite end of the house.
But when you're building houses and your goal is to build as many as you can as quickly as you can for as cheaply as you can, there's just no room for things like foresight, or spending a little extra to do it right, or even taking the slightest care when it comes to placing the house sanely on the plot of land.
I HATE modern tract-housing cheap-ass developer built "homes." They're sterile, they're shoddily constructed, and they seem to be designed by people who don't have a very firm grasp on the experience of actually...you know...living in houses like people.
There is no fucking reason to waste energy and resources to build a house that won't last at least a hundred years, unless you're a housing developer cutting corners on construction to rake in a little extra cash.