Tecniche di Produzione del Cemento Traslucido

The aim of the paper is to investigate different techniques used by some companies nowadays involved in the production of panels or blocks made of translucent cement. For doing that, the patents registered all over the world starting from the 2000 have been studied in deep, in order to acquire more detailed information about the techniques of production and to overcome the limits due to the lack of information about this subject that is difficult to find in literature. Particularly, patents by LitraConTM, Luccon, Lucem, Italcementi have been investigated; these last four industries are, at the moment, the only ones able to make in Europe translucent cement elements by using different techniques and materials. The translucent cement is certainly one of the most meaningful inventions of the XX century: an innovative material with great application potentialities in Architecture that are limited, at the present, from the costs of the materials used as components and from the complexity of the productive techniques. Really, the innovation is not due to the materials with which the translucent cement is made of (concrete and optics fibres in the “original recipe”concrete and plastic elements in the more recent recipes) but to the new performance that their composition allows to have, especially in relationship to the classes of demands related to the “aspect” and the “safety” of buildings, with obvious relapses on the management and on the comfort of their inner spaces. The light, through the optics fibres or the plastic elements, crosses the concrete panels/blocks allowing them to become translucent and to delineate the profile of objects and people postponed. Translucent concrete is generally used to make coverings, sinks or objects of Design like lamps; only in the Italian Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo it has been used to build the building envelope by finding, in this way, the celebrity in the world of Architecture even if, in order to see it diffusedly applied in buildings, it will probably need to still wait a lot. The production techniques patented up to now are very different and they have been adopted by different firms that have introduced a variety of product’s typologies on the market. These typologies are related to the dimensions of the elements blocks and/or panels, the performance especially related to the mechanical resistance, the light transmission, the thermal isolation, the costs. Deriving from the analysis of the patents that have been found in the EPO’s website in relation to the European firms that operate in the building market a panning of these techniques of production is showed in this paper.