Towards the physical programming of bio-based buildings for natural thermoregulation

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Decarbonizing the built environment presents many significant challenges. One is developing long-lived, fast-growing, bio-based construction materials at scale without destroyingDecarbonizing the built environment presents many significant challenges. One is developing long-lived, fast-growing, bio-based construction materials at scale without destroying soils, forests, and grasslands. Another is fully harnessing ambient heat sources and sinks for low-grade heating and cooling without excessive ductwork, piping, and refrigerants. This research program's long-term vision is to simultaneously address these two challenges by developing regional solutions for functionally integrated, bio-based buildings. Not only will these new bio-structures store carbon by prolonging the storage phase of natural carbon cycles, but they will also harness ambient energy for thermoregulation and ventilation with little to no equipment. Making these groundbreaking advances in integrated design requires concordant innovations at the material and building scale. Therefore, we focus on upgrading bio-based materials with special thermal functions by optimizing their internal composition, geometry, and surface morphology. We also focus on understanding the fluid mechanics of temperature cascades, where adjacent rooms exchange heat, so it is recycled upstream or recovered downstream of the warmest room. This new class of thermally-driven ventilation could eventually work in synchrony with the heat-exchanging materials developed in parallel investigations. This research program will focus on three short-term objectives planned over the next five years, working with a combination of theory, simulations, and experiments. Objective A investigates the use of load-bearing, bio-based composites for dynamic insulation. The focus is on characterizing the primary and supplementary heat-exchange mechanisms experimentally and optimizing for them. Objective B investigates the use of load-bearing, bio-based composites for thermal mass coupled with buoyancy ventilation. The focus is on understanding surface heat transfer and stratification profiles in situ and optimizing surface morphology accordingly. Finally, objective C investigates buoyancy flows in a temperature cascade. The focus is on exploring spatial arrangements that can sustain a thermally-driven ventilation flow, generate a temperature cascade between rooms, and recycle or recover heat across partition walls. We will use dynamically-scaled physical models and simulations to investigate these novel configurations. This program will help decarbonize construction industries in Canada and globally, while also creating new value-added supply chains in the bio-economy. It will train powerful industry-facing & public-oriented agents of change in the transition to a lower-carbon, more just, future for Canada.