Abstract
Building skins play a decisive role in maintaining occupant comfort. Adaptive building skins have been proposed to adjust to the weather, with mechanically complex multi-component solutions that require operating energy. Nature and its materials exhibit a fundamentally different strategy for environmental responsiveness; motile plant systems show entirely passive, integrative, hygroscopic actuation due to their cellulose-based material structure. Through a design and fabrication process we refer to as material programming, a bio-inspired and bio-based functional integration of actuator, sensor, and controller can be achieved. We present an overview of related research on weather responsive building components. Wood-based composite elements that respond to relative humidity without operational energy have been demonstrated at architectural-scale. This research was recently expanded through the additive manufacturing of custom-made natural fiber composites, allowing 4D-printed self-shaping compliant mechanisms based on highly differentiated and multifunctional plant movements with varying mechanical stiffnesses and actuation speeds. The application of 4D-printing to weather responsive shading systems still necessitates the codesign of materials, mechanism, and façade system as well as matching stimuli-responsiveness to ambient weather conditions and mass production at the scale of buildings. Overcoming these challenges will enable a more reliable, sustainable, and zero-energy solution for regulating comfort in the built environment.
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Wood, D., Cheng, T., Tahouni, Y., Menges, A. (2023). Material Programming for Bio-inspired and Bio-based Hygromorphic Building Envelopes. In: Wang, J., Shi, D., Song, Y. (eds) Advanced Materials in Smart Building Skins for Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09695-2_4
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