Novel biodesign enhancements to at-risk traditional building materials

Abstract

Extreme weather conditions increase the frequency of regular maintenance on heritage buildings and cause erosion of traditional materials. Developments in bio-enhanced self-repair materials provide an opportunity to improve building performance and reduce the frequency of costly maintenance schedules. The microbial sequestration of carbon by bacteria, encapsulated and layered into several limewash coats, facilitates capturing atmospheric carbon and reduces carbon-generating maintenance regimes. The use of hydrogels, alginates and biofilm derived biopolymers as novel bacterial encapsulation and nutrient delivery vehicles is discussed and the opportunity to develop self-healing sacrificial limewash as a future research project. Microbial enhanced carbon-fixing limewash may also offer a broader application to improve the performance of sustainable materials such as hemp-lime bio-composites as a fast-forward projection of problems and solutions with these materials in the future.

3D bioprinting of mineralizing cyanobacteria as novel approach for the fabrication of living building materials

“…To make inks with higher solid particle concentrations printable, further adjustments would be required, such as varying the methylcellulose concentration and the particle size distribution. For further improvement of the environmental sustainability of the ink, alternative support materials to sea sand could be used, such as fly ash, cement kiln dust, silica fume, limestone, microfibers, or slag (Bos et al, 2016;Irfan et al, 2019;Kaufhold et al, 2019;Bhattacherjee et al, 2021;Booth and Jankovic, 2022). Subsequently, algMC-based inks were tested with the cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp.…”