Thermal insulators are crucial to reduce the high energy demands and greenhouse emissions in the construction sector. However, the fabrication of insulating materials that are cost-effective, fire resistant, and environmental-friendly remains a major challenge. In this work, we present a room-temperature processing route to fabricate porous insulators using foams made from recyclable clays that can be locally resourced at very low costs. Foams containing either pure Kaolin or a Kaolin-based clay mixture are produced through mechanical frothing or an in-situ gas-generating reaction. Surface modification of the clay particles using a cationic amphiphilic molecule leads to particle-stabilized foams that are sufficiently strong to withstand the high capillary stresses developed during water evaporation. Self-supporting insulators with up to 90% porosity and thermal conductivities as low as 0.13 W/mK can thus be obtained by simple casting and drying at ambient temperature in an ultralow energy process. Such materials can be recycled by crushing, redispersion in water, and subsequent foaming. Porous structures with higher compressive strength are optionally created by sintering the dried foams at 1000 °C. The obtained porous materials perform comparably well with existing fire-resistant insulators while offering the possibility of closed-loop processing and wide availability from local resources as well as ultralow cost and embodied energy.

The automated handling of workpieces is one of the main enablers for automatic production systems and requires a stable grasping point determination. To select suitable grasp candidates for STL based models with a planar parallel jaw gripper we propose a two stage algorithm. First, the STL file is remeshed to create a boundary layer containing triangles for every surface of the handling object through a shifting of its edges. In the second step, antipodal grasping positions are determined with the use of local convex hulls, which are generated via a Delaunay3D triangulation, and through an orientation examination to classify the area as convex or concave. Based on this classification all convex points are cross checked to identify pairs of antipodal Points and the associated grasping position. An evaluation of our approach was performed on a test set containing 10 different industrial and everyday objects ranging from gears and shafts to sockets and a freeform body. For all objects a highly diverse solution set could be generated and through the remeshing process the number of grasping positions could be enlarged by at least 38 % for all objects.