Smart bricks will transform how buildings work

ORIGINAL: UWE Bristol

Smart bricks capable of recycling wastewater and generating electricity from sunlight are being developed by a team of scientists from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). The bricks will be able to fit together and create 'bioreactor walls' which could then be incorporated in housing, public building and office spaces

The UWE Bristol team is working on the smart technologies that will be integrated into the bricks in this pan European 'Living Architecture' (LIAR) project led by Newcastle University. The LIAR project brings together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global sustainability issues.

The smart living bricks will be made from bio-reactors filled with microbial cells and algae. Designed to self-adapt to changing environmental conditions the smart bricks will monitor and modify air in the building and recognise occupants.

Each brick will contain Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) containing a variety of micro-organisms specifically chosen to 

• clean water, 
• reclaim phosphate, 
• generate electricity and 
• facilitate the production of new detergents, 

as part of the same process.

The MFCs that will make up the living engine of the wall of smart bricks will be able to sense their surroundings and respond to them through a series of digitally coordinated mechanisms.

Professor Andrew Adamatzky, LIAR Project Director for UWE Bristol, is leading the UWE Bristol team, he said, “The technologies we are developing aim to transform the places where we live and work enabling us co-live with the building.

“A building made from bio-reactors will become a large-scale living organism that addresses all environmental and energy needs of the occupants. Walls in buildings comprised of smart bricks containing bioreactors will integrate massive-parallel computing processors where millions of living creatures sense the occupants in the building and the internal and external environmental conditions.

“Each smart brick is an electrical analogous computer. A building made of such bricks will be a massive-parallel computing processor.”

A photo-bioreactor is a device that can be programmed to utilize a variety of inputs such as 

• grey water, 
• microbial consortia (algae and bacteria), 
• carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and 
• different types of nutrient to generate outputs.

These outputs include

• 'polished' water, 
• fertiliser, 
• extractable products (recoverable phosphate), 
• oxygen, 
• next generation biodegradable detergents, 
• electricity, 
• recoverable biomass, 
• bio-fluorescence and to a certain extent, 
• heat.

Professor Ioannis Ieropoulos, Director of the Bristol Bioenergy Centre (BBiC), at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at UWE Bristol, said, “Microbial Fuel Cells are energy transducers that exploit the metabolic activity of the constituent microbes to break down organic waste and generate electricity. This is a novel application for MFC modules to be made into actuating building blocks as part of wall structures. This will allow us to explore the possibility of treating household waste, generating useful levels of electricity, and have 'active programmable' walls within our living environments.”

Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, who is co-ordinating the project, said, “The LIAR project is incredibly exciting – it is bringing together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global issues, like sustainability.”

The €3.2m LIAR (Living Architecture) project is co-ordinated by Newcastle University working with experts from the universities of

• the West of England (UWE Bristol), 
• Newcastle U
• Trento and Florence, 
• the Spanish National Research Council; 
• LIQUIFER Systems Group (Austria) and 
• EXPLORA.

The LIAR project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 686585

Think Like a Tree: What We Can Learn From the Oaks That Survived Katrina

Ten years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, bringing floods and gale-force winds that devastated the region and displaced more than a million people. But New Orleans’ live oaks were surprisingly resilient, as biologist Janine Benyus describes in our first episode of a new video series on biomimicry, Think Like a Tree. 

As the tallest living things on earth, trees have developed strategies to protect themselves against threats to their leaved towers. In the process, they’ve “managed to solve daunting problems of engineering,” says Steven Vogel, a Duke biologist who studies the ways organisms structure themselves in moving fluids. 

Take the beating a tree gets from a hurricane. Gale force winds hammer trees with a dynamic collection of blows, which unleashes “a suite of mechanical problems that would give an engineer nightmares,” Vogel says. Beyond withstanding high wind speeds, trees need to deal with wind acceleration and the air’s “throw weight”—its mass, basically. Calms between gusts can be damaging, too, as the tree rebounds and sways, potentially building up heavy loads on branches and roots. Not to mention the litany of other environmental factors that come into play during a storm: precipitation levels, soil conditions, the state of the surrounding trees. 

So, what’s a tree to do?
Leaves that work great for photosynthesizing become liabilities in high wind, Vogel says, where they act like little sails with a lot of drag. So in strong, 40 mph winds, the leaves of trees like maple, poplar, and holly will reconfigure into more aerodynamic shapes: curling up into little tubes, clumping together into cones, or flattening to reduce drag. And strong root systems serve as a countermeasure to the drag of the leaves and the wind’s sideways force. 

Trees might be silent, brilliant engineers, but Vogel cautions that they may not be the best candidates for biomimicry. Trees operate under certain constraints—they grow all their own material, which takes energy that could be spent on other needs like reproduction. “Nature usually builds to a design criterion of adequate strength,” Vogel says, and that means maximizing whatever will keep the population going. If one tree goes down, that’s okay as long as most of them survive. But we build our cell towers and skyscrapers much more sturdily than they usually need to be, because we want them to work all the time. And we can account for that, Vogel says, thanks to modern engineering. So we’ll stick with our steel beams for now. 

ORIGINAL: Wired