New grant looks to biomaterials to reduce construction waste

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris from man-made polymers and petroleum-based materials was generated in 2018 in the United States. That total amounts to more than twice the amount of municipal solid waste that was generated during that same period. A new grant from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) will allow a Penn State-led research team to study whether fungal biomaterials can replace synthetic acoustic insulation, potentially reducing construction waste.

Benay Gürsoy, assistant professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, leads a team of researchers that has been awarded an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative Grant to study the acoustic absorption properties of mycelium, which is the root-like structure of mushrooms and other fungi, with the goal of designing and building acoustic panel prototypes to be tested in the built environment.

Titled “Fungal Biomaterials for Sustainable Architectural Acoustics,” the project builds on work Gürsoy has been leading in her Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab within the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing on fabricating biodegradable building components using mycelium. The lab’s work was awarded an Upjohn Research Initiative grant last year, the Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation 2021 Research Prize and was featured in the Biomaterial Building Exposition at the University of Virginia last spring.

According to Gürsoy, there is a growing community of architects that is exploring the use of mycelium, which can be grown on a variety of organic waste materials, in architecture.

“Mycelium-based composites are renewable and biodegradable biomaterials that result when mycelium, the vegetative root of fungi, is grown on agricultural plant-based residues. These novel biomaterials have the potential to replace conventional petrochemical building materials without relying on the extraction of non-renewable resources,” she said. “In our research at ForMat Lab, we explore sustainable ways of cultivating mycelium-based building parts and structures.”

Natalie Walter, a second-year master’s degree student who is a co-principal investigator (PI) on the project, became interested in Gürsoy’s work with mycelium-based composites while finishing her bachelor of architecture degree at Penn State. She was awarded an Erickson Discovery Grant as an undergraduate architecture student, which she used to explore mycelium-based composites and their relationship to architectural acoustics with Gürsoy.

“This experience initiated the line of research on myco-acoustics, which has informed my master’s thesis, as well as this Upjohn project,” she said.

Walter is cultivating mycelium-based composite samples in the Mushroom Research Center at Penn State to determine their acoustic absorption abilities as well as their mechanical properties to assess their use in building applications.

Penn State faculty researchers John Pecchia, associate professor of plant pathology and director of the Mushroom Research Center, and Nathan Brown, assistant professor of architectural engineering, are co-PIs on the project, as is Linnea Hesse, group leader of the Plant Biomechanics Group at the Botanical Garden at the University of Freiburg. ForMat Lab researchers Ali Ghazvinian, an architecture doctoral candidate, and Alale Mohseni, an architecture master’s degree student, are collaborators.

“Right now, we are investigating if our biomaterials can compare acoustically to conventional acoustic materials by testing them in an impedance tube to gather their absorption coefficients, which we then use to analyze their acoustic performance,” explained Walter. “We are also doing mechanical tests to ensure that these materials can physically be used for acoustic panels.”

Walter said that the team is hoping to gain a more holistic understanding of mycelium-based composites — and biomaterials, in general — for use as architectural components.

“We believe that biomaterials can play a huge role in reducing the embodied carbon [the term for the greenhouse gas emissions that arise from the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and disposal of building materials] and amount of waste generated during material manufacturing. So, from a materials standpoint, we hope to contribute new knowledge to this field that can benefit the architectural industry at large,” she said.

Walter also said that the team’s work is novel in the interdisciplinary approach that is being taken.

“This project combines fields of architecture, engineering, mycology and acoustics into one line of research. With this approach, we can see different perspectives that we may have been unable to consider with just architectural backgrounds,” she said.

Gürsoy agrees that the approach the team is taking to the project allows for a deeper understanding of this novel biomaterial and its mechanical and acoustic performance.

“We are validating the research by designing, building, testing and learning from full-scale prototypes, alongside computer simulation models and optimization techniques,” said Gürsoy.

Gürsoy was one of the co-organizers of the Fungal Biomaterials and Biofabrication Workshop at Penn State in May 2022, an event that featured interdisciplinary presentations, panels and discussion groups with the goal of initiating new research collaborations and initiatives on fungal biomaterials.

Penn State adaptive screen system for buildings featured in Lisbon Triennale

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State-designed window screen system that automatically changes its shape based on indoor and outdoor environmental conditions is part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal through Dec. 5. The responsive building façade system features screens made of smart and bistable materials that are located inside a building’s windows that open and close based on the weather conditions and lighting outside, as well as the indoor lighting and climate requirements.

Faculty and student researchers from the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing (SCDC) in the College of Arts and Architecture, the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Systems (LiMC2) in the College of Engineering and the Materials Research Institute (MRI) collaborated to design the adaptive architecture project, which lets in or blocks sunlight to regulate the internal building temperature while consuming less energy.

The kinetic materials used by the team in the screens have not yet been used in building shading design.

Titled “Kinetic snapping skins: Envisioning climate-adaptive environments,” the project also uses artificial intelligence to predict environmental conditions and determine the best configuration of the façade for each time and day of the year.

Since buildings in the United States account for around 40 percent of total energy consumption, adaptive buildings can better satisfy the needs of those who use the buildings while also consuming less energy and material resources.

“This means that these buildings have a lower ecological footprint and can mitigate the effects of climate change,” said José Pinto Duarte, Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation in the Stuckeman School and director of the SCDC.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), an architecture, urban planning and engineering firm based in New York, also collaborated on the project, which evolved from research that was initiated in the SCDC on smart buildings and cities.

“There’s a great consciousness among engineers of all different types about the energy costs regarding buildings,” said Clive Randall, director of the MRI and professor of materials science and engineering. “There will be ways in which we will be making bricks differently, where we will be making the overall structure of buildings differently, and also the lighting and transience of thermal properties will all be very different in the future to really bring down that net cost of energy.”

Elena Vasquez, a lead researcher in the SCDC on the project who graduated with her doctorate in architecture in August 2022, said the goal was to develop a kinetic bistable screen that can help regulate daylight in buildings.

“Adaptive architecture in general and this adaptive screen project in particular are great demonstrators of living materials, which respond to external stimuli like sunlight or electricity to tilt, move and bend in order to protect the inside of the building from the outside,” said Zoubeida Ounaies, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the LiMC2.

According to Duarte, systems like the one the Penn State team designed can be incorporated in future buildings.

“This is just the beginning. Developments in sensing technology and the capacity of the system to learn will improve a building’s ability to collect data and find optimized integrations on many different levels,” he said.

Vasquez said the next step of the project would be “to find a way to fully automate the system and to find ways to make the materials even smarter, or we use solar energy to power the system.”

“These are all the ideas that we have for the future direction of the project,” she said.

The theme for the 2022 Lisbon Triennale is Terra (Earth) and consists of four exhibitions, four books, three awards, three days of conference proceedings and a selection of independent projects. The Penn State project was selected to be a part of the online publication for the Universities Award, which compiles research projects that an international jury determined reflect the theme of Terra.

In addition to its selection to the Lisbon Triennale, the “Kinetic snapping skins” project was awarded the American Institute of Architects (AIA) UpJohn grant and the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) Award.