The construction sector is under increasing pressure to improve its efficiency and effectiveness, reducing environmental impacts, material use and costs. A computational tool was developed to design and fabricate functionally graded building components. The material composition was defined based on voxel determination in order to design building elements with varying material stiffness. A cement-based conceptual building wall was investigated with a varied material composition, using two different lightweight aggregates, a granulated cork one and the other with expanded clay. This functionally graded material concept applied to lightweight building components will allow producing resource-efficient graded building components tailored to specific loading conditions, minimizing waste generation, emissions and resource consumption.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.