by Holly
If you are reading this blog, you may think life is all fun and games for us now that we are living in Malaysia. Trips to the mall, tourist attractions, great food, swimming pool - in other words, living it up! In fact the reason we have the opportunity to do this at all is my job. So what am I doing here at work?
My company has a partnership with a major solar manufacturing company to build a pilot scale wafer making plant here to test out and scale up our technology. The new plant is being built alongside their existing (much bigger) factory here, and the wafers made at the pilot plant can be processed into cells and modules at the neighboring fab.
Over the last year, our two companies have worked closely together at sites around the world to design the new plant and the equipment that will go into it, then make that equipment, and now to build the plant. Next will come moving things in and getting all the equipment and process steps going.
Construction started over the summer. The construction arm of our partner company has been running this aspect of the project, along with a local engineering firm and an asian international plant construction contractor.
It has been interesting to see how the building has been put together and how materials and practices differ from what I would expect to see in a similar project in the US. In general, things seem to be done with greater reliance on a bunch of guys (labor) instead of more machinery or fancy tools (capital). Probably labor is cheaper relative to capital here than in the US. As is typical in the US, workers are nearly exclusively male.
One aspect which I have found interesting is masonry construction. This building started with a basic steel structure and the roof. Getting the roof up soon is probably crucial here where it is tough to work outside in the direct sun and it rains every day for large parts of the year.
Once the roof and steel were up, lots of concrete columns were poured as well as a framework of horizontal concrete beams. Then infill masonry was used to fill up the openings between the concrete and steel beams. Exterior walls and interior firewalls were built up with masonry and then covered over with smooth stucco and painted.
Most masonry infill has been done with this cool foamed cement block product from a Malaysian company named Greencon. The block is called AAC and it is made by mixing sand, fly ash, lime, cement, and aluminum powder. The aluminum powder reacts with the other alkaline ingredients to produce hydrogen gas, which puffs up the mixture with tiny gas pores. It is then autoclaved. Not sure why that is needed, maybe to cure it with smaller pores and quickly enough that the bubbles don't come out. They make the products in huge blocks, then cut it up later into slabs and smaller blocks. The resulting product looks like very light colored concrete block with a diffuse surface, but when you pick it up it seems almost like a foam brick. The density is 0.55, about 1/4 the density of solid concrete. In theory it should float on water!
The reduction in the amount of raw materials needed to make a given section of wall and the use of post-industrial materials like fly ash significantly reduce the environmental impact and carbon footprint vs. standard concrete. It provides better insulation because it is full of gas pores, and it is far easier to cut, shape, and stack than ordinary concrete block. Here is a shot of a broken block in the scrap yard - easier to see the pores.
I saw a pallet from another supplier of AAC block as well at a much later date on site.
The blocks used in the pilot plant are 60x20cm and about 10cm thick. They are stacked in single width with staggered courses using a surprisingly small amount of mortar in between. The foamed nature makes it easier to create penetrations later for pipes and wires. Being masonry, it is rot and fire resistant, etc.
A cement based stucco is applied to both sides, then paint. Ends up looking pretty good. Here is a section of wall after stucco, before paint.
One thing it seems to not like much is getting wet on a regular basis. So the internal walls in the bathrooms and prayer rooms were built from regular fired red brick topped with a stucco coat and paint.
In Malaysia, most people seem to not use toilet paper. The standard is to have a water sprayer on a flex hose like we would see at a kitchen sink in the US installed next to each toilet. This one, for example, is in my house.
From what I understand, one uses the sprayer and the left hand to do the necessary business. I need to figure out the technique to do this well, not having grown up in this tradition. Youtube videos perhaps? In the meantime, we carry a roll of TP in our bag when we go out. Most bathrooms in common access places have a TP holder, but it is often empty.
Anyway, the upshot is that while the necessary cleaning is done probably more comfortably and completely in comparison to paper, water does tend to spray around quite a bit in the bathroom. This is unfriendly to toilet paper nearby, and also means that every bathroom has a floor drain and things in there are are regularly in contact with water.
At the factory building, we will have a male and a female prayer room (Surau), which I believe are required by law. I am not knowledgeable on the details, but I understand that water is used in devotion rituals. So these rooms also got red brick walls.
I've kicked around some pieces of AAC scrap on site that have been soaked by rain outside, and it's not as though they turn into mush. Maybe they take a long time to dry out.
In America this role would be more traditionally served by cinder block. Probably has more innate structural integrity than 100mm thick AAC blocks, but they are very heavy to build with and harder to modify for running systems through later. So if the structure is provided by steel and concrete beams and columns, AAC block seems like a nice way to do infills.
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