Operating buildings, for either commercial or residential use, accounts for as much as 41 percent of the energy consumption in the United States of America. Adaptive building skins are active filters between the interior environment and outside weather conditions. These skins are able to respond to changing outdoor weather conditions and indoor operational needs, potentially reducing the energy demand of a building by as much as 51 percent. However, current adaptive building skins rely on mechanical hinges and actuation devices of high construction complexity and life cycle cost. These attributes are obstacles to their broader adoption. Therefore, this project pursues fundamental research underlying the development of lighter, more durable, and, mechanically, less complex adaptive skins. The research on building skins follows plant leaves that change their shape based on weather conditions. Changing skins will produce more energy efficient buildings. This will lead to decreased greenhouse gas emissions, less US dependency on fossil fuels, and improved well-being of individuals in society. For this project, a team spanning the disciplines of civil and mechanical engineering, material science and botany is assembled. This project will have a broad educational impact through the curating of an exhibition at a national museum and providing research experiences at high school, undergraduate and graduate levels and outreach to the K-12 community.
Plants utilize elastic properties of their organs to move with minimal energy and maximum effect. The core idea for the research is to interpret, upscale, modify, and tailor elastic deformation mechanisms found in plants to mechanically less complex adaptive building skins. The research hypothesis addresses how the elastic deformation response of these bio-inspired skins can be refined and controlled in time and space through optimized geometric design to follow a trajectory defined by environmental performance criteria. The study will combine experimental and numerical methods. The research tasks are (i) identifying, interpreting and up-scaling elastic kinetics in plant movements for adaptive building skins, (ii) characterizing the elastic deformation response to meet environmental performance requirements and tailoring this response through shape optimization, and (iii) numerical and physical evaluation by constructing and testing full-scale prototypes.
