The most popular method of demolition these days is by implosion, but not always welcome in certain areas or situations. The use of explosives can greatly damage neighboring buildings and spread hazardous materials over a large radius, which is why a cooling tower at the Mülheim-Kärlich power plant in Germany had to be slowly dismantled from the top.
For over a year, a robotic excavator was employed to chomp the tower down in height from over 530 feet tall to 262 feet tall. The machine rode along the lip of the cooling tower as it took bites at a time off the structure.
Once the tower got below the specified, engineers were still denied a permit to use explosives to bring the remaining portion of the building down, according to CNN, so they instead decided to use robots again to weaken the supporting structures and force the tower to fold in upon itself.
The base of the structure was made up of 36 V-shaped columns and the robotic excavators took 4 hours to chew through enough of them to cause the structure to ultimately fall.
Germany plans to dissolve all of its current nuclear power plants over the coming years after slowly easing off of the power source following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The more recent Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 greatly sped up the government’s plans to decommission all nuclear plants.
You can check out the video below for footage of the robotic excavator and the final fall of the structure.
While still new in the construction industries, robots are typically designed to perform a specific task in a highly precise and efficient way, like the rebar tying robot, Tybot or the brick-laying robot Hadrian X. More recently, though, robots are being imagined as platforms for 3rd party companies to develop hardware and accessories to attach to the base robot, like the Boston Dynamics robotic dog, Spot. I recently came across a new robot, called Baubot, which hopes to one day perform tasks using every tool on a typical jobsite.