What is the minimum thickness of a wall in stone masonry?

It is generally considered to be 6″. You can get thinner but stone size, shape orientation, and reinforcement quickly become predominant issues. In other words, the wall starts behaving more like concrete bellow 6″ in thickness and like a shell structure below 4″ in thickness. Keep in mind when I say they behave in a …

Can buildings be built using Tensegrity, such as skyscrapers?

Yes, but… If you look at most examples you will notice strictly a framework. A few examples will suspend a bridge or solid form using it or them, as a compression strut. So you become limited to structures so big the occupied portions look like the struts or a large mass supported by a couple …

If you dug a tunnel from one place on Earth to its antipode, how long would it take you to walk that tunnel at an average walking speed?

Ok. Earth is between 7,899.8 (pole to pole) to 7,926.4 (equator through the center to equator) miles. People comfortably walk at about 3mph. This gets you between 2,633 to 2,642 hours. That would be basically 110 days or just less than 4 months. Of course, this assumes you never stopped walking and kept at the …

What size concrete slab can hold 90,000 lbs?

There are two ways to look at this: A surface that needs to hold something like a 90,000lb vehicle rolling along. Or. A 90,000lb concentrated load coming down such as a column. For the first scenario, you need something like 8″-12″ thick reinforced concrete. Conditions below the slab generally define the difference. For the second …

What kinds of materials are used to cut obsidian?

Obsidian is glass and therefore is cut exactly like glass. While there are lots of methods of stress and thermal breaking of thin-walled glass, I get the feeling that everyone is imagining a block or slab of obsidian. You’re not going to like the answer then. For large pieces you have two general choices: grind …

Does “variable load” mean that a structure can take that load at any given area each at a time or all at the same time?

Most of the time a variable load is a variable distributed load, VDL as opposed to a uniform distributed load, UDL. The variable changes from one rate to another which is either greater or less than the first. This represented as a wedge. Cases were this comes in is where loads are applied at an …