Papers & Publications
2022
Smart Bamboo Systems: Combining Material Intelligence with Modern Manufacturing
Jonas Hauptman, Daniel Hindman, Keith Hack, Greg Marggraf
International Conference on Non-conventional Materials and Technologies (NOCMAT) 2022
ABSTRACT
Rising demand for housing in the global south must be met while focusing on lowering carbon emissions to mitigate the growing influence of climate change. Current bamboo structures typically consist of (1) lattice-based structures using full culm bamboo, which do not create modern building enclosures, or (2) bamboo composites which require disaggregation and reconstitution of the bamboo, increasing the carbon footprint. This paper explains our concept, Smart Bamboo (SB), a lightly modified bamboo composite system that uses digital analysis and fabrication tools to create panelized building systems that utilize the sectional properties of full culm bamboo with composite cross-lamination strategies.
Exploring Life Center Design Through Standardless Material
Jonas Hauptman
37th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS 37): Blatant | Latent
ABSTRACT
The goal of this paper is to extend the principles of Life- Centered Design (LCD) and to reveal latent pedagogical opportunities through three design-build projects. Life- Centered Design is defined as a design perspective that seeks to create symbiotic relationships between all impacted forms of life1. LCD equally considers the user of a design and the living system(s) constituting the design. This consideration makes room for a deeper exploration of both the biological underpinnings and the application of end-use of a material in any design process. The three projects are architectural follies using bamboo as the primary material. The projects move from generative/iterative design to realization through a technology-aided fabrication and build process. Through this process students effectively explore symbiotic design solutions that meet the needs of human users while adapting to the natural, often irregular quality of bamboo. The blatant pedagogy of building something offers students the opportunity to directly engage material and build hree-dimensional computer-aided design modeling, design computation, and physical prototyping. The latent pedagogy is activated through the need to adapt and design to the endless variation in a material such as bamboo; there can be no preconceived stock solutions as each piece of bamboo must be uniquely addressed. Collectively the projects offer a series of ial symbiotic relations between the taxonomy of bamboo and the designers’ intent.
2020
Harps Enable Water Harvesting under Light Fog Conditions
Weiwei Shi, Thomas W. van der Sloot, Brandon J. Hart, Brook S. Kennedy, and Jonathan B. Boreyko
Advanced Sustainable Systems
ABSTRACT
Fog harvesting is useful for passively collecting fresh water in arid regions, but the efficiency of current mesh-based harvesters is compromised by their poor drainage. Inspired by the linear needles of redwood trees, “fog harps” are developed whose array of vertical wires enables an unobstructed drainage pathway. A full-scale (1 m2 frame) fog harp is fabricated by winding a stainless steel wire around a spinning aluminum frame featuring threaded rods. The fog harp is field tested for a full year at a local farm (Blacksburg, VA, USA), alongside the control case of a mesh harvester. Under moderate fog conditions, the fog harp collects anywhere from 2 to 78 times more water compared to the mesh harvesters. Under light fog conditions, the fog harp collects up to several hundred milliliters of water per day while the mesh is unable to collect any water at all. The water harvesting performance of fog harps is therefore unprecedented in two ways: they substantively elevate the performance ceiling when exposed to healthy fog while also enabling, for the first time, appreciable water harvesting under light fog.
2019
Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials
Katie MacDonald, Kyle Schumann, Jonas Hauptman
Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) 2019: Ubiquity and Autonomy
ABSTRACT
Digital fabrication techniques have long been aimed at creating unique geometries and forms from standardized, often industrially produced or processed material. These materials have predictable, uniform geometries which allow the fabrication process to be aimed at producing variation through Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) milling of topological surfaces from volumetric stock or profiles from sheet material. More recently, digital fabrication techniques have been expanded and categorized to address the inherent variation in a found material. Digital materiallurgy defines an approach where standard techniques are applied to non-standard materials; in form-searching, non-standard materials such as unmilled timber members or chunks of concrete waste are analyzed for optimization within a digital fabrication process. Processes of photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and parametric analysis have been used to advance these methods and minimize part reduction and material waste. In this paper, we explore how such methods may be applied to materials without traditional standards—allowing for materials that are inherently variable in geometry to be made usable and for such eccentricities to be leveraged within a design. This paper uses bamboo as a case study for standardless material, and proposes an integrated digital fabrication method for using such material: (1) material stock analysis using sensing technology, (2) parametric best-fit part selection that optimizes a given piece of material within an assembly, and (3) parametric feedback between available material and the design of an assembly which allows for the assembly to adjust its geometry to a set of available parts.
Structural Performance of Faced Calcutta Bamboo (Dendrocalamus strictus) for Use in Joined Structural Assemblies
Jonas Hauptman, Katie MacDonald, Kyle Schumann, Daniel Hindman and Tom Hammett
ISBS 2019 – 4th International Sustainable Buildings Symposium
ABSTRACT
Bamboo has the potential to be a transformative sustainable building material on a global scale but remains underutilized due in part to the natural irregularity of the poles and the subsequent difficulties in predictably harvesting, grading, and applying the material in structural applications. Dendrocalamus strictus (Calcutta Bamboo) is a unique species of solid structural bamboo, allowing for applications more akin to a wood product than traditional hollow bamboo. By facing one or more sides of the bamboo and creating a flat surface through stock reduction, opportunities for constructing consistent and reliable joints are created, whether the bamboo is joined to itself or to other more common flat or linear elements. Facing the bamboo poles also creates opportunities for dimensional and geometric consistency as well as the ability to control certain aspects of structural performance through changing the orientation of the faced bamboo. This paper examines the structural performance of faced Calcutta Bamboo through static bending, tensile strength, and hardness. Comparative performance of bamboo that has been faced to varying degrees, from no faces to four faces, is presented, as well as an analysis of the comparative performance of faced and unfaced poles to other traditional and non-traditional forest products.
Addressing barriers for bamboo: techniques for altering cultural perception
Kyle Schumann, Jonas Hauptman, Katie MacDonald
Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) 2019: The Future of Praxis
ABSTRACT
The potential benefits of bamboo as a rapidly-renewable, low-carbon, sustainable building material are well established, yet bamboo remains underutilized globally due to laborious manual evaluation and fabrication techniques and deeply-rooted aesthetic stigmas in western culture. Scholarship in this area has the potential to radically redefine the usage of bamboo as a cheap and sustainable material, but in practice the widespread implementation of bamboo is limited by its cultural perception. This paper examines cultural perceptions of bamboo as a cheap and informal or kitsch vernacular material, using existing scholarship and projects to analyze existing methods and attempts in practice to either elevate or transform perceptions of bamboo through built work and engineered materials. The paper posits how new research by the authors aimed at transforming the use of solid bamboo species can radically shift the way in which bamboo is perceived, transitioning from an irregular kitsch vernacular material to a refined material system that mimics accepted conventions or invents new vernaculars.
2018
Bio-Fabrication and Bio-Inspired Manufacturing Techniques for the Built Environment
Brook S. Kennedy, Christopher Maurer, and William Sullivan
Advances in Manufacturing and Processing of Materials and Structures
ABSTRACT
This chapter provides how biology is inspiring new manufacturing methods. Bio-fabrication and bio-utilization are some of many terms used to describe the practice of harnessing natural processes to manufacture products, chemicals, and so on, that also solve human problems. One bio-fabrication research area steadily gaining momentum is “mycoterials” and “mycotecture”. Synthetic biology is another rapidly growing branch of bio-fabrication that has applications in medicine, building science, and increasingly, in consumer product manufacture. One particularly interesting dimension of bio-inspiration is “bio-inspired manufacturing”. Bio-inspired technologists and contemporary fabrication methods again show promise to reinvent how we manufacture structures with less material at all scales. One widely published example of built environment self-repair was explored by Dutch researcher Henk Jonkers at the Delft University of Technology. Like an external immune system, unmanned aerial vehicle may soon patrol and repair built environment without attracting much attention.
Fog Harvesting with Harps
Weiwei Shi, Mark J. Anderson, Joshua B. Tulkoff, Brook S. Kennedy, and Jonathan B. Boreyko
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
ABSTRACT
Fog harvesting is a useful technique for obtaining fresh water in arid climates. The wire meshes currently utilized for fog harvesting suffer from dual constraints: coarse meshes cannot efficiently capture microscopic fog droplets, whereas fine meshes suffer from clogging issues. Here, we design and fabricate fog harvesters comprising an array of vertical wires, which we call “fog harps”. Under controlled laboratory conditions, the fog-harvesting rates for fog harps with three different wire diameters were compared to conventional meshes of equivalent dimensions. As expected for the mesh structures, the mid-sized wires exhibited the largest fog collection rate, with a drop-off in performance for the fine or coarse meshes. In contrast, the fog-harvesting rate continually increased with decreasing wire diameter for the fog harps due to efficient droplet shedding that prevented clogging. This resulted in a 3-fold enhancement in the fog-harvesting rate for the harp design compared to an equivalent mesh.
Biodiversifying bioinspiration
Rolf Müller, Nicole Abaid, Jonathan B. Boreyko, Charless Fowlkes, Ashok K. Goel, Cindy Grimm, Sunghwan Jung, Brook Kennedy, Christin Murphy, Nathan D. Cushing and Jin-Ping Han
Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing, Bioinspiration & Biomimetics
ABSTRACT
Bioinspiration—using insights into the function of biological systems for the development of new engineering concepts—is already a successful and rapidly growing field. However, only a small portion of the world’s biodiversity has thus far been considered as a potential source for engineering inspiration. This means that vast numbers of biological systems of potentially high value to engineering have likely gone unnoticed. Even more important, insights into form and function that reside in the evolutionary relationships across the tree of life have not yet received attention by engineers. These insights could soon become accessible through recent developments in disparate areas of research; in particular, advancements in digitization of museum specimens, methods to describe and analyze complex biological shapes, quantitative prediction of biological function from form, and analysis of large digital data sets. Taken together, these emerging capabilities should make it possible to mine the world’s known biodiversity as a natural resource for knowledge relevant to engineering. This transformation of bioinspiration would be very timely in the development of engineering, because it could yield exactly the kind of insights that are needed to make technology more autonomous, adaptive, and capable of operation in complex environments.
Designing A Fog-Harvesting Harp
Brook Kennedy, Jonathan Boreyko, Weiwei Shi, Mark Anderson, Josh Tulkoff, Tom Van der Sloot
Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Edu 2018
ABSTRACT
It is well known that research universities provide fertile ground for interdisciplinary work between science, engineering, design and other fields. Specifically, in industrial design, faculty and students have the opportunity to translate new discoveries and technologies into useful inventions- for both societal impact and commercial benefit. To date, a great deal has been written about the innovative output and educational value of interdisciplinary collaboration, leveraging applied research, problem solving (McDermott, Boradkar & Zunjarward 2014) and campus entrepreneurship (Etzkowitz, 2000). But, there is also growing evidence that industrial design faculty and students can form worthwhile partnerships with scientific research as well, to help develop new technology earlier in the innovation pipeline: through producing lab test mockups, envisioning product applications of discoveries and in helping define research goals early on (Driver, Peralta & Moultrie 2011). Distinct in many ways from the kind of professional industrial design work conducted in the private sector, this “lab-integrated industrial design,” for lack of an established term, also provides unique student learning experiences: namely, the industrial design student can be completely integrated from day one in a research program rather than serving a more traditional “translational” role after the fact. For this educational reason along with significant design research output potential, such collaborative, interdisciplinary partnerships with scientific research should not be overlooked, especially in universities with direct access to advanced scientific activity. To demonstrate more specifically what these partnerships can look like, this paper presents a case study of an ongoing, fully integrated lab-to-product development partnership involving the creation of a novel fog harvesting device called “Fog Harp.” The invention of Fog Harp was a direct outcome of a close relationship between Professors Brook Kennedy in the department of Industrial Design (ID) and Dr. Jonathan Boreyko in the department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics (BEAM) at Virginia Tech. Thus far, eight industrial design students have been able to work on the project from the outset which has enabled three of them to be deeply involved in developing an alpha version of the device. As a result, they have been able to witness the invention process first hand and have been named co-inventors on patent applications and co-authors in scientific publications.