Living plants provide an opportunity to rethink the design and fabrication of devices ordinarily produced from plastic and circuit boards and ultimately disposed of as waste. The spongy mesophyll is a high -surface area composition of parenchyma cells that supports gas and liquid exchange through stomata pores within the surface of most leaves. Here, we investigate the mesophyll of living plants as biocompatible substrates for the photonic display of thin nanophosphorescent films for photonic applications. Size-sorted, silica-coated 650 ± 290 -nm strontium aluminate nanoparticles are infused into five diverse plant species with conformal display of 2-μm films on the mesophyll enabling photoemission of up to 4.8 × 10 13 photons/second. Chlorophyll measurements over 9 days and functional testing over 2 weeks at 2016 excitation/emission cycles confirm biocompatibility. This work establishes methods to transform living plants into photonic substrates for applications in plant-based reflectance devices, signaling, and the augmentation of plant-based lighting.
The average builder in the USA provides a warrantee for 10 years, and the US Department for Energy calculates that US office buildings have an average lifespan of 73 years. No building is permanent, and all will face demolition at some point. When a building comes to the end of its safe and useful lifespan, there is no method for re-using the material in new buildings, instead, all constructions today require virgin material. This is a problem for sustainability because US cities, like most other global cities, require cyclical replacement of ageing buildings, and therefore perpetual resource extraction. This paper provides techniques for computationally arranging materials after the demolition and unmaking of architecture. Rather than downcycling concrete into low-value aggregate or melting float glass into opaque bottles methods are shown for this material to be indexed, re-machined and algorithmically arranged into new assemblies. These assemblies are conceived of as holding patterns; an indexed library of materials that are put into useful architectural arrangements, but ready to be disassembled towards some future use. These holding patterns are used as infill to the city rather than landfill beyond. Rather than building for sixty-year life spans, the project offers an imagination of eternal re-constructions that can learn from the carcass of past buildings. Based on rough estimates 2016 could be the first year where there exists more than one trillion tons of concrete on earth. More than the total weight of living trees on the planet (Crowther et al. 2015; USGS, 2018). This paper begins to develop new aptitudes for re-fitting misfit material rather than consuming evermore.
Architectural structures achieving high strength and stiffness with intelligent, but intricate geometry may now be materialisable through additive manufacturing (AM). However, conventional layer-based AM also produces parts with inconsistent structural strength -thereby limiting AM's end-use applications. Expanding on robotics-enabled AM techniques addressing this limitation, a novel design-fabrication framework for producing structurally optimised lattices is presented here. Lattices are geometrically morphed to maximise their structural stiffness-to-weight ratio while respecting fabrication constraints imposed by the robotic printing process, and converted into tool-paths for PLA extrusion with a custom-built end effector mounted on an industrial robot arm. The printing process leverages thermal imaging for Lattice additive-manufactured with robot-arm 121 calibration, and develops a novel joint detail to increase the reliability and load-transfer capabilities of the print. Together, these techniques and methods -validated through comparative structural load testing -show promise for architecture-scale AM that combines structurally driven geometry with complexity-agnostic materialisation in new and exciting ways. (2018) 'Fabrication-aware structural optimisation of lattice additivemanufactured with robot-arm', Int. J. Rapid Manufacturing, Vol. 7, Nos. 2/3, pp.120-168. Biographical notes: Kam-Ming Mark Tam is an Integration Engineer at Thornton Tomasetti's CORE Studio and a researcher at the Digital Structures research group (DS) of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT)Building Technology (BT) programme, where he investigates approaches for design space exploration that combine both structural and fabrication considerations. Specifically, he has developed methods to simplify the design modelling and analyses of complex structural systems, and robotic-enabled additive manufacturing (AM) techniques to create high-performance AM-produced parts. He earned a MEng in Civil Engineering from MIT, and a MArch and a HBAS (with Economics Minor) from the University of Waterloo. He has taught in the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Pratt Institute, and practiced in several architectural firms.
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