Collaborative Research: Adaptive and Reconfigurable Tiles for Building Surfaces

University Of Dayton, Dayton OH

Investigators

Abstract

The environment continually changes at many different scales and with many different impact levels, and yet, the current U.S. building stock, in general, does not. Current practice for architects and engineers is to isolate the internal space of a building from the external environment with static barriers. Alternatively, substantially greater levels of energy efficiency can be realized by structures that interact with and respond to their environment. This project pursues fundamental research to utilize smart materials to design and optimize exterior building panels that operate as selective filters capable of adapting to environmental stimuli, such as solar insolation. Smart materials provide the unique ability to comprise structures that respond to external stimuli and transform into optimized geometric configurations. Such a morphing façade system will significantly alter the total sustainability of a building envelope and take advantage of available environmental energy sources. Beyond direct application to building technology, this work provides core concepts that can accelerate the implementation of novel adaptive structure concepts in fields such as aeronautics, astronautics, and the automotive industry. This research integrates multiple disciplines, including mechanics, materials engineering, architecture, and computer-aided engineering, as well as a geographically diverse team, and will facilitate mentorship and education of a diverse group of students. The smart material exterior building panels will be realized as modular building tiles comprised of shape memory polymer with controllable local activation and actuation. The technical approach involves three major thrusts: 1) Establishing a computational framework for the development of smart material tile morphing mechanisms; 2) Prototyping the tile concept to evaluate the feasibility of materials and morphing mechanisms and validating the computational methods; and 3) Numerical investigation of building case studies to evaluate the potential benefits of the smart material tile concept to overall building envelope efficiency. In addition to establishing a new concept in responsive building technologies, the computational efforts represent a substantial contribution to the field of computational methods for inverse problems, particularly the formulation of uniquely tractable and generalizable shape-based design objectives that could be used to facilitate accurate and efficient computational inverse solution procedures in a variety of shape-based applications. This work will further establish the concept of smart material morphing structures with controllable local actuation and activation.