JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #136 - September/October 2020 - 41

Biocomposites and automation: a sustainable future for the building industry

Fig. 2: Sandwich panel made from laminated Bioflexi

Fig. 3: General
view of the Tailored
Biocomposite Mock-up
2019

The pavilion design was optimized for
assembly from only four different geometrical variations of biocomposite plates
connected with reusable screws. This
approach then made it possible to disassemble the pavilion to its basic elements
for later use in a different location and
configuration.
Tailored Biocomposite Mock-up 2019
The Tailored Biocomposite Mock-up
2019 is an example of new aesthetic architectural features of bio-based materials
from long flax fibres using digital manufacturing technologies and generative
design methods (Figure 3). This small
structure was successfully built as a monolithic single-curved canopy, generatively
designed as a lightweight structure of
225cm height and 125cm width. Tailored
Fibre Placement (TFP) was chosen as a
fabrication method to produce a precise
shell structure with controlled flax fibre
orientation according to the predominant
tension forces.

The BioMat Team
Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hanaa Dahy,
BioMat Department Director
M.Sc. Piotr Baszyński,
Research Associate
Ing. arch. Jan Petrš,
Research Associate
M.Arch. Evgenia Spyridonos,
Dipl.-Ing., Research Associate

construction industry, can open radically
new possibilities for designing lightweight
structures.

The canopy form was topologically optimized to reduce the amount of unnecessary material and achieve optimum lightness. The mock-up structure consisted of
six layers of flax tape-based TFP preforms
1m x 1.40m overlapping each other. The
ready-made preforms were then moulded
using the Vacuum-Assisted Resin Transfer
Moulding (VARTM) process.

Automation as a step
towards sustainability
Introducing bio-based materials from annually renewable resources and designing
structures according to design-to-disassembly principles answers only part of the
problem of sustainability in construction.
BioMat believes that the introduction of
material solutions based on the computer-aided design of fibre paths and automatized fabrication of composite element
preforms offers the construction industry
a transition from broad reliance on manual
labour of individual workers to the gradual
introduction of an automatized production
process for both single building components and whole long-span structures. This
way, the construction industry will have a
chance to compete with other industries in
terms of productivity and efficient use of
resources.

The project illustrated how a technology
fine-tuning material performance at the
single fibre level, already well established
in the composite field and imported to the

More information:
https://www.itke.uni-stuttgart.deinstitute/biomat/

N°136 September - October 2020

/ jec composites magazine

Feature Sustainability

Biocomposite Pavilion 2018
The experimental Biocomposite Pavilion
was built in the centre of Stuttgart as the
result of ten months of intensive work, following many years of work on the applications of bio-based materials in future-oriented sustainable architecture (Figure
1). The Pavilion covered an area of about
55m² with a span of 9.5m and a height of
3.6m, and was formed of a double-curved,
parametrically-designed segmented shell
of 121 light biocomposite elements
connected by single-curved wood sheets.
The plates consisted of a flexible wooden
core laminated in-between two 3D veneer
sheets shaped to 3D stiff bent elements.
Lamination did not only change the nature
of the flexible core board into the required
shape, but it also made it possible to create
a biocomposite sandwich panel with
adjustable mechanical properties allowing
the originally available elastic material to
be stiffened and applied as a structural
component. The holistic geometry of
the shell resembled a 3D fabric, in which
the curved elements were connected to
common nodes in all directions in space
to provide the necessary space stiffness.
The pavilion expressed new aesthetic
architectural features of biocomposite
materials and showed their possible use as
a structural material.
The goal was to construct the pavilion using
laminated biocomposite flexible boards
(Bioflexi) previously developed by the head
of BioMat, Prof. Hanaa Dahy (Figure 2).
The board is made from natural fibres combined with a thermoplastic polymer, mostly
bioplastics, manufactured by extrusion. The
natural fibres, such as straw, are agricultural
production residues, which find a second
life as a local material for architectural use.
This material is used as the core of the
composite board, where it is laminated
in-between two 3D veneer sheets.

https://www.itke.uni-stuttgart.de/institute/biomat/

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #136 - September/October 2020

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