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Tag: Construction

This robotically fabricated structure aims to promote low carbon construction

Posted on by dishanth
This robotically fabricated structure aims to promote low carbon construction

A team of students and researchers from the University of Michigan have created a robotically-fabricated structure made entirely from timber.
They aimed to promote low-carbon construction, creating a complex architectural structure from local materials.
The designers hope it can serve as an example of how robotic construction can enable more sustainable forms of construction and minimize waste.

A team of students and researchers has shown how, with the help of robots, it’s possible to build an intricate pavilion using only small pieces of timber.

The Robotically Fabricated Structure is the result of a project by the Adel Design Research (ADR) Laboratory at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

 

The robotically fabricated structure was built using only small pieces of timber. Image: ADR Laboratory

 

The ambition was to promote low-carbon construction, by showing it’s possible to create complex architectural structures using wood that is sourced from the local region rather than imported.

Custom algorithms were used to calculate the optimal arrangement for the timber 2x4s, removing the need for any larger beams within the structure.

 

Robots assembled the components into a series of prefabricated frames, which were then delivered to site and slotted together by hand.

“The coupling of custom algorithms and robotic fabrication enables the feasible realisation of bespoke building components that are otherwise difficult or costly to achieve through conventional means and methods, with minimal construction waste,” explained ADR, which is led by professor Arash Adel.

“Short elements enable the use of indigenous trees that cannot easily produce full-length building elements, construction and manufacturing off-cuts, and lumber elements reclaimed from the deconstruction of buildings, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable practice,” said the team.

 

The tunnel is made up of 20 robotically fabricated frames. Image: ADR Laboratory

 

Robotically Fabricated Structure has been installed in the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, where it can be used as a place of rest and shelter, or host exhibitions and performances.

Raised on an oval-shaped timber platform, it takes the form of a curved tunnel with an integrated bench seat wrapping on of its edges.

The tunnel is made up of 20 robotically fabricated frames, which themselves are made up of various components. Each one is slightly different, which gives the structure its undulating shape.

As each piece of wood has the same thickness, it was possible to design these frames so that they slot together. This helped to reduce the need for screw fixings.

The design is longlisted for Dezeen Awards 2022 in the small building category.

The designers hope it can serve as an example of how robotic construction can enable more sustainable forms of construction and minimise waste.

 

Robots assembled the components into a series of prefabricated frames. Image: ADR Laboratory

 

 

Source World Economic Forum

Future cities could be 3D printed – using concrete made with recycled glass

Posted on by dishanth
Future cities could be 3D printed – using concrete made with recycled glass

3D printed concrete may lead to a shift in architecture and construction. Because it can be used to produce new shapes and forms that current technologies struggle with, it may change the centuries-old processes and procedures that are still used to construct buildings, resulting in lower costs and saved time.

However, concrete has a significant environmental impact. Vast quantities of natural sand are currently used to meet the world’s insatiable appetite for concrete, at great cost to the environment. In general, the construction industry struggles with sustainability. It creates around 35% of all landfill waste globally.

Our new research suggests a way to curb this impact. We have trialled using recycled glass as a component of concrete for 3D printing.

Concrete is made of a mix of cement, water, and aggregates such as sand. We trialled replacing up to 100% of the aggregate in the mix with glass. Simply put, glass is produced from sand, is easy to recycle, and can be used to make concrete without any complex processing.

Demand from the construction industry could also help ensure glass is recycled. In 2018 in the US only a quarter of glass was recycled, with more than half going to landfill.

 

Building better

We used brown soda-lime beverage glass obtained from a local recycling company. The glass bottles were first crushed using a crushing machine and then the crushed pieces were washed, dried, milled, and sieved. The resulting particles were smaller than a millimetre square.

The crushed glass was then used to make concrete in the same way that sand would be. We used this concrete to 3D print wall elements and prefabricated building blocks that could be fitted together to make a whole building.

 

A building envelope prefabricated using the 3D printing process. Mehdi Chougan, Author provided

 

If used in this way, waste glass can find a new life as part of a construction material.

The presence of glass does not only solve the problem of waste but also contributes to the development of a concrete with superior properties than that containing natural sand.

The thermal conductivity of soda-lime glass – the most common type of glass, which you find in windows and bottles – is more than three times lower than that of quartz aggregate, which is used extensively in concrete. This means that concrete containing recycled glass has better insulation properties. They could substantially decrease the costs required for cooling or heating during summer or winter.

 

Improving sustainability

We also made other changes to the concrete mixture in order to make it more sustainable as a building material, including replacing some of the Portland cement with limestone powder.

Portland cement is a key component of concrete, used to bind the other ingredients together into a mix that will harden. However, the production of ordinary Portland cement leads to the release of significant amounts of carbon dioxide as well as other greenhouse gases. The cement production industry accounts for around 8% of all carbon dioxide emissions in the environment.

Limestone is less hazardous and has less environmental impact during the its production process than Portland cement. It can be used instead of ordinary Portland cement in concrete for 3D printing without a reduction in the quality of the printing mixture.

 

3D printed layers of a wall element. Mehdi Chougan, Author provided

 

We also added lightweight fillers, made from tiny hollow thermoplastic spheres, to reduce the density of the concrete. This changed the thermal conductivity of the concrete, reducing it by up to 40% when compared with other concrete used for 3D printing. This further improved the insulation properties of the concrete, and reduced the amount of raw material required.

Using 3D printing technology, we can simply develop a wall structure on a computer, convert it to simple code and send it to a 3D printer to be constructed. 3D printers can operate for 24 hours a day, decrease the amount of waste produced, as well as increase the safety of construction workers.

Our research shows that an ultra-lightweight, well insulated 3D building is possible – something that could be a vital step on our mission towards net zero.

 

 

Source The Conversation

Black & Veatch: No More Coal Construction

Posted on by dishanth
Black & Veatch: No More Coal Construction

Black & Veatch is ending the company’s participation in coal-based power market design and construction, saying it will allow the company to focus on clean energy technologies. The engineering and construction giant’s announcement Oct. 29 comes just more than a month after another major energy company, General Electric, said it would exit the new-build coal power market.

“We are an employee-owned company, and we do not make decisions based on what the market wants to hear, or how the market will react,” said Mario Azar, president of Black & Veatch’s power business, in an interview Thursday with POWER. “We make decisions based on the values of our company. We’ve been around for more than 100 years, and we want to be around for another 100 years or more.

“That’s how we make decisions as the executive committee of Black & Veatch,” he said. “It’s really centered around our values and our future. It was us, telling ourselves, did we really want to be part of that [coal] legacy anymore?”

Overland Park, Kansas-based Black & Veatch in a news release said it recognizes “the global power industry is in a state of transformation and needs to accelerate the path to net zero as many companies, communities and stakeholders forge ahead with commitments to lower carbon emissions.” The company said it “will fulfill current project commitments to completion,” but going forward its efforts “will focus on supporting clients through their transition to a balanced energy portfolio with cleaner energy sources and towards achieving their decarbonization and sustainability goals.”

Black & Veatch, founded in 1915, is a global leader in the engineering and construction industry, and had revenues of $3.7 billion in 2019. The company over the past several years has increased its participation in renewable energy and energy storage technologies, and in Thursday’s announcement said it has supported “deployment of hydrogen as a carbon-free fuel and advanced technologies for carbon capture.” The company also has invested in modernizing a power grid that increasingly must accommodate intermittent renewable energy and different baseload sources of generation.

 

Decarbonization Targets

The company in its announcement said the move away from coal is a recognition that “clients need to reliably achieve varying decarbonization targets,” and said the shift allows the company’s workforce “to further accelerate the creation of solutions that help transform the industry, including helping clients reduce dependence on coal power assets and minimize the impact of those assets to the environment.”

“The transition away from any coal-related activity is about our commitment as a company to sustainability and accelerating our efforts to lead the emerging carbon-free energy future,” said Steve Edwards, the company’s CEO.

“There’s going to be a point when you have to make some of these difficult decisions,” Azar said. “We have been involved in building power plants in Asia, some of which we’re in the process of finishing, and as we near completion—particularly in Asia—there’s been a new wave of projects we’ve been invited to participate in. Looking at the future, looking at our sustainable commitment as a company, looking at the economics today that make renewable energy affordable, and certainly energy that is far, far lower in emissions than coal … we asked ourselves, ‘Do we really want to build another coal plant that is going to pollute the air for a very long time to come?’ We decided we don’t. It’s time to recognize that this is just the right thing to do.”

He continued: “There is a financial implication to this decision. We are leaving projects that we can participate in behind, and there is a [financial risk] to it, but we believe it is a very short-term implication compared to a longer-term vision. It’s really about the future, a cleaner and very robust energy alternative to coal.”

 

New Technology Needed

Azar, who came to Black & Veatch in 2018 after stints with Siemens and Westinghouse, said the changing power landscape calls for more engineering prowess and technical innovation. “At the same time the industry wrestles with its transformation, global communities continue to have demand for safe, reliable and cost-effective power,” he said. “These forces create a delicate balance that requires deep engineering and technology expertise to help guide the complex transition of power generation and delivery infrastructure.”

Black & Veatch in its news release noted that earlier this year the Intermountain Power Agency (IPA) selected the company as Owner’s Engineer on IPA’s Intermountain Power Project Renewal Project, “one of the earliest installations of combustion turbine technology designed to use a high percentage of green hydrogen,” it said.

The company’s new 2020 Strategic Directions: Electric Reports details how the power generation industry is pursuing lower-carbon solutions, including integration of renewable resources to the power grid to increase resilience and reliability.

Black & Veatch already is working on emerging technologies for carbon capture and utilization. It also is looking at advanced nuclear power technologies, such as small modular reactors, which were part of the focus of POWER’s virtual Distributed Energy Experience event Oct. 19-22.

Black & Veatch on Thursday said it recently surveyed more than 600 power industry executives, and more than 75% indicated their companies are investing more money in clean energy, with 8 in 10 saying spending on new generation capacity will be directed toward solar power, microgrids, and other distributed energy resources (DERs). Black & Veatch said its commitment to help clients achieve clean energy goals mirrors its own; by 2023, the company plans to have reduced its overall emissions by 20%, and its fleet and building emissions by 40% compared to 2019 levels.

 

 

By Darrell Proctor

Source: Power Mag

Wood, metal, paper and fabric can help cut climate-harming plastics

Posted on by dishanth
Wood, metal, paper and fabric can help cut climate-harming plastics

Replacing plastics used in buildings with metal, wood, ceramics and glass, turning to paper and fabric for packaging, and boosting recycling rates could slash planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, researchers said on Monday.

A mixture of substitution, changes in business models and consumer behaviour, and producing more plastics without using fossil fuels could halve global plastic consumption and cut emissions from plastics by more than half, they said.

Otherwise, emissions from plastics are expected to increase threefold by 2050, jeopardising a goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, said a new report from the London-based Overseas Development Institute.

“Although plastics permeate our lives and every corner of our planet, it is technically possible to largely phase them out,” the report said.

 

When somebody buys a plastic product, they don’t actually generate emissions when they’re using it. But there’s emissions embodied in the product from the previous stages. – Andrew Scott, research fellow, Overseas Development Institute

 

Lead researcher Andrew Scott told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that all but 1-2 per cent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, principally oil and gas, with the emissions produced at different stages of the value chain.

“When somebody buys a plastic product, they don’t actually generate emissions when they’re using it. But there’s emissions embodied in the product from the previous stages,” he said, adding emissions could also come from discarded plastics.

The largest use of plastic is for packaging, accounting for 36 per cent of total output in 2015, followed by construction at 16 per cent, the report said.

However, switching to non-plastic alternatives that are currently available, such as wood and metal, could reduce the use of plastics in the construction industry by 95 per cent, it said.

A combination of regulation on single-use plastics and changes in consumer behaviour could cut plastic consumption by 78 per cent in the packaging sector, it added.

There is also much room for improvement with recycling as only about 20 per cent of plastic waste is recycled today, the report noted.

It also looked at the automotive and electrical and electronic equipment sectors, which together with construction and packaging make up more than 60 per cent of plastic use, said Scott.

North America, Europe and East Asia consume almost two-thirds of the world’s plastics, the report said.

Globally, per-capita consumption of plastics is 47 kg (103.6 lb) per year, but in Africa and South Asia, it is less than 10 kg per year.

A report last week from the Changing Markets Foundation criticised consumer giants such as Colgate-Palmolive, Danone, Nestlé and Unilever for failing to meet their pledges to use less plastic in their products.

It also said they had lobbied against and undermined efforts to tackle plastic pollution, a charge the companies denied.

This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate.

 

 

By Thomson Reuters Foundation

Source: Eco-Business