The Dawn of Super Structures

This is an investigation into technology-being able to allow us to build skyscrapers that are bigger and smarter. 2011, we have already built a skyscraper thats half a mile high and thats in Dubai. But i have another solution, one to so many engineers and architects worries-whether its environental, physical, this can solve it all. Imagine you are in the 210th storey of a cuilding and the wall in front suddenly starts changing from green to red! Then, the air conditioning kicks in suddenly and cools the air. When the sun comes, your windows suddenly change to a tinge of black and the shades come down almost instantly. When your throat feels thirsty, the water dispenser automatically dispenses some water and a robot passes the cup to you. All this sounds a little far fetched but technology is currenly being developed to a status where everyone is visualising the future, the dawn of reality, allowing architects to build structures, not only standing out in terms of height but also intelligence. After all these painstaking research, i seem to have found a way, a seemingly impossible way and alittle doubtful because i am still a student after all!

What lies in the first step would be nanomaterials.On wikipedia, it states that Nanotechnology is a field that takes a materials science-based approach to nanotechnology.Nano is one billionth of a metre and nanotechology means one billionth of a metre techology.Surprising? Indeed, modern materials such as plastic have been nano engineered, window planes, made to absorb less heat, solar panels, floor tiles and even your washing machine! Medicine too, such as the delivering of drugs through our blood through nanotechnology. Today, i am going to focus this talk on nanotechnology. What shows to be the most promising now is carbon nanotubes, although you may think that they are tiny since they are one billionth of a metre, they are even 140 times stronger than steel, so to say the strongest material on Earth. This makes it very effective in the maintenance of buildings and also challenging building projects, for example, nanotechology can be used in the recent upcoming downtown line line project, whereby different construction obstacles still stands. Using carbon nanotubes to replace steel, these reinforced concrete are much stronger, allowing the workers below to drill with much more safety. That is again applied in skyscrapers. Most of the world's skycrapers are amade of steel, and many of our flats, roads are ade with steel reinforced concrete and steel is made up of a large majority of carbon. If we could successfully replace the carbon with carbon nanotubes, steel acquires more strength literally.

Anther example-the World's longest suspension bridge now stands at 1991m in Japan, but with nanotechnology, a bridge of 6000m-6km with only two supporting structures can be achieved-with carbon nanotubes instead of steel. Also, the talles building in World is the Burj Khalifa buiding in Dubai which stands at 828m. With nanotechnology, the world's talles building can stand at 2400m astonishingly! For a tall skyscraper, it has to cope with something called cortex shedding, which occurs when a rapid flow of air round the building aligns with its resonant frequency, generating huge forces that shake the structure. To combat that, the Burk Khalifa changes its shape as it goes taller, but that reduces valuable office space. So what i sugest it does is to use moving vertical ailerons-similar to the horizontal flaps on airplanes and put them on the side of the building, maintaining air flow.

After this, we still need to ensure that the building maintains its intelligence. So what can we do? Use tiny sensors, of course! These sensors can be developed to collect everything from concrete cracks etc and with microprocessors and 100 intel core 7 2nd generation processors churning information, the building will turn into one with a brain. So what about the heart, the heart that keeps all these sytems running? Of course, power! And power can be derived fromm the sun, once cagain, we mention nanotechnology to capture as much sunlight as possible.

In this area of research, now we have come to area whereby how to make walls change colour itself based on the temperature of the room? Quantum dots, they are called, tiny particles of semiconductor material and they display unique properties, responding to environmental changes, thus, when they are inserted into walls, they change colour whenever the room cools or heats. Or even switching on the air conditioning when it is needed. Also, they may be inserted in a building and alerting it of excessive strains! However, something which we cannot guard against is the toxic materials found in Nanotechnology causing long-term health implications.

Here, i end my long but painstaking reserch on Super Structures, i hope you have a better insight of our technology now!