Adaptive Building Skin to Enhance Interior of Buildings

在美国，用于商业或住宅的运营建筑物占能源消耗的41%。自适应建筑表皮是内部环境和外部天气条件之间的主动过滤器。这些表皮能够应对不断变化的室外天气条件和室内运营需求，从而有可能将建筑物的能源需求降低51%。 然而，当前的自适应建筑表皮依赖于高构造复杂性和生命周期成本的机械铰链和致动装置。这些属性是其更广泛采用的障碍。因此，该项目追求基础研究，开发更轻，更耐用，机械，更简单的自适应皮肤。对建筑表皮的研究遵循植物叶子根据天气条件改变形状。改变表皮将产生更节能的建筑。这将减少温室气体排放，减少美国对化石燃料的依赖，并改善社会中个人的福祉。 为了这个项目，组建了一个跨越土木和机械工程、材料科学和植物学学科的团队。该项目将通过在国家博物馆策展展览，提供高中、本科和研究生水平的研究经验，并推广到K-12社区，产生广泛的教育影响。植物利用其器官的弹性特性，以最小的能量和最大的效果移动。这项研究的核心思想是解释、升级、修改和定制植物中发现的弹性变形机制，以适应机械上不那么复杂的建筑表皮。该研究假设解决了如何通过优化的几何设计在时间和空间上优化和控制这些生物启发皮肤的弹性变形响应，以遵循环境性能标准定义的轨迹。这项研究将结合联合收割机的实验和数值方法。研究任务是（i）识别，解释和放大适应性建筑表皮的植物运动中的弹性动力学，（ii）表征弹性变形响应以满足环境性能要求，并通过形状优化定制此响应，以及（iii）通过构建和测试全尺寸原型进行数值和物理评估。

Operating buildings, for either commercial or residential use, accounts for as much as 41 percent of the energy consumption in the United States of America. Adaptive building skins are active filters between the interior environment and outside weather conditions. These skins are able to respond to changing outdoor weather conditions and indoor operational needs, potentially reducing the energy demand of a building by as much as 51 percent. However, current adaptive building skins rely on mechanical hinges and actuation devices of high construction complexity and life cycle cost. These attributes are obstacles to their broader adoption. Therefore, this project pursues fundamental research underlying the development of lighter, more durable, and, mechanically, less complex adaptive skins. The research on building skins follows plant leaves that change their shape based on weather conditions. Changing skins will produce more energy efficient buildings. This will lead to decreased greenhouse gas emissions, less US dependency on fossil fuels, and improved well-being of individuals in society. For this project, a team spanning the disciplines of civil and mechanical engineering, material science and botany is assembled. This project will have a broad educational impact through the curating of an exhibition at a national museum and providing research experiences at high school, undergraduate and graduate levels and outreach to the K-12 community.Plants utilize elastic properties of their organs to move with minimal energy and maximum effect. The core idea for the research is to interpret, upscale, modify, and tailor elastic deformation mechanisms found in plants to mechanically less complex adaptive building skins. The research hypothesis addresses how the elastic deformation response of these bio-inspired skins can be refined and controlled in time and space through optimized geometric design to follow a trajectory defined by environmental performance criteria. The study will combine experimental and numerical methods. The research tasks are (i) identifying, interpreting and up-scaling elastic kinetics in plant movements for adaptive building skins, (ii) characterizing the elastic deformation response to meet environmental performance requirements and tailoring this response through shape optimization, and (iii) numerical and physical evaluation by constructing and testing full-scale prototypes.