This article was taken from the November 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Francesco Tassone's family-run company, Personal Factory, based in Simbario, Italy, is moving cement manufacture into the cloud.
Rather than purchase cement by the tonne from huge, environmentally unfriendly plants, his customers buy a compact Origami 4 cement machine and mix their own. A web connection supplies the know-how, and Personal Factory provides a coded envelope containing the active ingredients for the cement mix, plus empty cement bags with scannable codes to ensure their contents are precisely what's needed. "Mortar production consists of 98 per cent inert material such as sand, and just two per cent of chemicals that add colour or water proofing," explains Tassone. By shipping only the additives, cement can be manufactured to order using locally sourced sand and gravel.
Overseen by computer software at Personal Factory's base, each Origami 4 can create and bag 80 to 100 tonnes of product. "I started with the idea of cloud computing and ended up with cloud manufacturing," says Tassone. "The goal is to dematerialise and distribute production, while keeping data management centralised. We no longer need to move goods. Just information."
Origami 4 is a self-contained cement plant that takes up just six metres squared. Here's how Personal Factory's amazing machine delivers the goods.\1. On a touchscreen, select the product and raw materials.
\2. Add sand to the cement chemicals from Personal Factory.
\3. Scanning a code tells Origami 4 which cement to make.
\4. Scan an empty cement bag, then put it under the nozzle.
\5. The sand mixes with the chemicals to make the cement.
\6. Origami 4 cleans itself by vibrating at high speed.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
