Collaborative Research: Adaptive and Reconfigurable Tiles for Building Surfaces

环境在许多不同的尺度和不同的影响水平上不断变化，然而，目前美国的建筑存量，总的来说，没有。目前建筑师和工程师的做法是用静态屏障将建筑的内部空间与外部环境隔离开来。另外，可以通过与环境相互作用和响应环境的结构来实现更高水平的能源效率。该项目进行基础研究，利用智能材料设计和优化外部建筑面板，作为能够适应环境刺激的选择性过滤器，如太阳暴晒。智能材料提供了独特的能力，包括响应外部刺激的结构，并转化为优化的几何构型。这种不断变化的外墙系统将显著改变建筑围护结构的总体可持续性，并利用现有的环境能源。除了直接应用于建筑技术之外，这项工作还提供了核心概念，可以加速在航空、航天和汽车工业等领域实现新的自适应结构概念。这项研究整合了多个学科，包括力学、材料工程、建筑和计算机辅助工程，以及一个来自不同地理位置的团队，并将促进对不同学生群体的指导和教育。智能材料建筑外面板将被实现为由形状记忆聚合物组成的模块化建筑瓷砖，具有可控的局部激活和驱动。该技术方法涉及三个主要重点：1)建立智能材料瓦片变形机制开发的计算框架；2)对瓷砖概念进行原型设计，评估材料和变形机制的可行性，并验证计算方法；3)对建筑案例进行数值调查，以评估智能材料瓷砖概念对整体建筑围护结构效率的潜在效益。除了在响应式建筑技术中建立一个新概念之外，计算方面的努力对反问题的计算方法领域做出了重大贡献，特别是在独特的可处理和可推广的基于形状的设计目标的制定方面，可用于促进在各种基于形状的应用中精确和有效的计算反解程序。这项工作将进一步建立具有可控局部驱动和激活的智能材料变形结构的概念。

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.