Towards High-Performance and Carbon-Negative Civil Structures with Renewable Bio-Based Materials: A Topology Optimization Approach

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Civil structures built with carbon-intensive materials produce a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Effective reduction of greenhouse gas can be partially achieved by the adoption of carbon-negative bio-based construction materials (e.g., timber and bamboo). While the mechanical properties of these materials have been studied, how to capitalize on their intrinsic anisotropic behaviors to maximize structural performance remains an underdeveloped topic. This award aims to establish a theoretical, computational, and experimentally validated framework to enable next-generation carbon-negative civil structures with minimized life-cycle environmental impact and maximized structural performance. Through physics-based optimization, tailored fabrication, and industrial collaboration, this project will produce innovative structural solutions that yield negative net-carbon emissions, high performance, and efficient material use, and effectively contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas and mitigation of climate change. The research will be complemented by creating interactive educational tools in outreach activities to engage underrepresented minorities, solving industry challenge problems in the classroom, and enhancing academia/industry interactions by engaging practitioners. The specific goal of the research is to synergistically integrate optimization with environmental impact considerations, physics-based modeling, experimental fabrication and validation to understand, optimize, and realize high-performance and carbon-negative civil structures. Four integrated objectives are pursued. A versatile multi-material structural representation to parametrize, model, and integrate both bio-based and conventional materials will be created. Based on the representation, a sustainability-oriented multi-objective optimization framework that generates structures with high performance, negative carbon emissions, and material efficiency will be formulated. Systematic pathways for the practical use of optimized solutions in structural applications will be established. The generated optimized structures will be prototyped at desktop-scale and meter-scale to validate performance and theory. This project will reveal fundamental knowledge of the optimal structural layouts and how to distribute anisotropic bio-based materials with conventional construction materials to achieve maximized structural performance. This project will establish a new paradigm for designing and optimizing next-generation carbon-negative civil structures to eventually help effectively mitigate climate change while achieving lightweight and optimal structural performance. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.