CEB Press Design Rationale, Product Ecology
"The CEB Press takes earth/dirt/soil and compresses it tightly to make solid blocks useful for building. Compressed earth blocks have many advantages as a building material: by making the building materials from the readily available dirt on the building site, they eliminate the need to transport bricks from elsewhere, reducing the financial cost and environmental impact of transport. Compressed earth blocks are very strong and insulate well against both heat and sound, making for very energy-efficient building (especially combined with the energy savings from not needing to transport them from offsite). Best of all, the material they use is already on-site and does not need to be purchased -- quite literally, dirt-cheap! The CEB Press satisfies many of the OSE Core Values OSE_Specifications#GVCS_Specifications.2FCore_Values
1. User Friendly. The CEB Press can be operated by one unskilled person and repaired by someone with a minimum of skill.
2. Closed-Loop Manufacturing. With the bricks produced by the CEB Press you can build a workshop in which you can built another CEB Press.
3. Industrial Efficiency. The GVCS CEB Press design exceeds the performance of other known open and closed source brick presses.
4. Ecological Design. The ecological respectfulness of CEB's is difficult to beat. They require a bare minimum of mechanical processing and they can last longer than other "green" building materials.
5. Systems Design. The CEB Press is not perfect on its own, but it does perfectly fill a niche in the GVCS system of systems.
6. Simplicity. With only a few moving parts the CEB Press just doesn't have enough "stuff" to create complications.
7. Village Scale. The CEB Press can produce enough bricks for a 1,000sqft structure in a single day. A single CEB Press could build a village in a few months.
8. Proven Techniques. Compressed Earth Brick construction is quite competitive in terms of thermal insulation, sound insulation, labor and maintenance.
9. Local Resources. What could possibly be more local than the dirt you're standing on? With the CEB Press you can turn your yard into a house.
10. Radical Abundance. There's so much dirt lying around our planet is named after it.
Definition: The Liberator is the world's first, high performance (16 brick per minute), open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. It is used to compress clayey soil (20-30% clay by volume) from local or on-site soils into structural masonry (700-1000 PSI) building blocks. The Liberator is a hydraulic press which presses from the bottom to produce 6”x12”x(2-6)” block, and it is fully automatic. It requires only a single tractor operator to produce block – using a front-loader to feed soil into the 6 foot wide hopper. The Liberator is designed-for-disassembly, in that most of the structure is fastened together with bolts. This constitutes lifetime design via easy serviceability, and this allows for crating the machine into a compact package (6'x3'x3') for shipping.
Problem Statement: Housing is the most significant cost in one's life in the Western world. Earth is the most abundant resource that is suitable for the construction of homes. Earth has excellent thermal mass properties, and is extremely durable. Over ½ of the world's entire population lives in some form of earth construction (ref). Many techniques for building with earth1 exist, including cob, adobe, earthbags, earth tubes, and rammed earth. However, all of these techniques are extremely labor intensive – or in the case of rammed earth, both labor and capital-intensive due to the necessity of using forms.
Solution: A CEB press is a solution to rapid production of brick for both natural and industrial-scale construction. Access to CEB machines, along with effective soil-handling infrastructure, allows for rapid, low-cost, high-quality construction from on-site earth. Stabilization with cement may be used for additional weather resistance. Timbrel and other vault techniques may be used to produce roofs out of earth as well. (MIT ref) This has the potential for significant reduction of one's largest, single cost of living, and allows for build-out of communities at minimal material cost. CEB also lends itself to the construction of floors, paved areas, retaining walls, storage structures, or any other structures where a uniform, structural building block is desired.
Further Infromation - Wikipedia, Analysis of Interlocking block construction; Powell and Sons, leading competitor, costs $45k2; The Green Machine;
Project Status and Development Needs: Full Product Release reached in June, 2010. This is the first Full Product Release from Open Source Ecology. 2D CAD drawings are available in dxf format (ref), but need organizing. 3D CAD, complete fabrication blueprints, and fabrication documentation video need to be produced. Architecture drawings for archetypal CEB houses and other structures, as well as building technique3 best practice documentation, are required to assist others in building with CEB. Documentation of CEB construction workflow and ergonomics is also required, as is full documentation of open business models for: (1), CEB machine fabrication; (2) brick production operations; (3) CEB construction enterprises.