While the forces and energies acting on our building stocks are highly mutable (i.e., from the changing climates to the occupant behaviors) current building practices still design and operate building exterior envelope (e.g., façade) as a static system. Substantial energy saving potentials reside in solutions that transcend building envelope from a simple protective space divider to a more intelligent and responsive skin attuned to climate and energy optimization. This project investigates a novel approach to autonomously control the thermal and mechanical properties of building façades using pressure-regulated metamaterials. Unlike mechanically actuated kinetic louvers that require numerous moving parts and high operational energy, the deformable mesostructure of some metamaterials can respond to fluidic pressure and collectively change the envelope properties at macroscale level. This will lead to radically less maintenance and lower life-cycle cost. It also offers advantage over smart materials by providing adaptation to much broader variations in climate conditions and occupant demands. This project will have broad impacts through collaborations with industrial partners and national labs. The research experiences will be integrated into a multidisciplinary education and outreach program to engage a diverse group of graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students, particularly, the students from historically underrepresented groups.
The objective of this research is to enable the design and operation of self-adaptive building envelopes that can proactively respond to the changes in surrounding environments and evolve their performance over time. By utilizing the interactions between fluids and mesoporous metamaterials, the thermal and mechanical properties of building façade can be reactively tuned to reduce building energy consumption and suppress mechanical vibrations that are detrimental to building structures. The hypotheses of this research are (1) the reversible volume reaction between fluids and pressure-responsive metamaterials can be utilized to manipulate the thermal and mechanical properties of building façade; and (2) building energy and structural efficiencies can be synergistically improved by allowing the envelope system to dynamically interact with the changing environments. Specifically, three interrelated tasks will be carried out where: (1) a computational framework will be established to design and optimize pressure-responsive metamaterials with adjustable thermal and mechanical properties; (2) an autonomous control strategy will be formulated based on Model-Free Reinforcement Learning method to enable the otherwise passive building envelope to learn and adapt to the continually changing environments; and lastly (3) full-scale component validation tests and case studies will be performed to quantify the energy saving potential.
