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Exploiting the Potential of Nature for Sustainable Building Designs: A Novel Bioinspired Framework Based on a Characterization of Living Envelopes
Abstract
Living envelopes, such as biological skins and structures built by animals, are functional and sustainable designs resulting from years of evolution, conditioned by biological and physical pressures from the environment. When building a home, animals demonstrate inspiring strategies to protect themselves from predator threats and external climatic conditions. As for human buildings, temperature, humidity, air quality, light, are some of the various factors they have to manage for optimal conditions. Facing the climate emergency, growing efforts to build durable designs have led designers to search for more efficient or alternative solutions by observing Nature. The emerging field of bioinspiration including animal architecture has already brought few but rare exemplary innovations that were integrated into building designs. Data on animal architecture are scattered among various biological domains, from observation of species habitats by zoologists such as entomologists or ornithologists, to bioindicator studies by climatologists. Data collected by scientists is available in eclectic idioms, a challenge to be fully comprehended by building designers. This chapter presents a characterization of living envelopes aiming at facilitating the transposition of some relevant biological features into innovative and sustainable architectural designs. The approach is architecture and engineer oriented, assessing biological functions and strategies, using criteria that are meaningful to building designers: functional and temporal analyses of spaces and materials, physical factors regulated through envelopes, behaviors, and interactions of species. Applied to a sample of species and animal-built structures, the characterized biological role models put forwards multi-functionality and efficiency through relevant construction techniques, the use of local resources, as well as behavioral adaptation. Examples of applications inspired from the characterized species are described, from theoretical proposals to a very practical application of an adaptive envelope skin inspired by the Morpho butterfly.
This PhD work aims at developing a design process of building envelopes inspired by living organisms using an experimental approach. For this purpose, different key steps of the bio-inspired design process are addressed. First, the exploration of a defined perimeter of living organism, analogous to building envelopes, i.e., biological envelopes and animal constructs, highlights relevant features and strategies for the envelope and its required functions. Workshops gathering building stakeholders - architects, engineers - lead to the development of various envelope principles. One of them, based on a hybridization of thermoregulatory principles from two species, is selected as a case study. Using parametric design tools, the principle is transferred into a technological concept of a deformable and deployable adaptive envelope, managing air, heat and light transfers through the wall. The prototyping of such a system then lead to its technological and experimental evaluation at different scales. A test bench is designed to perform 1:1 scale experiments under real climatic conditions. The measurements, coupled with grey box models, offer first elements towards its characterization and the evaluation of its global impact on a building. The objective of an approach that can be used and appropriated by different building actors without requiring prior knowledge in biology is achieved, while promoting interdisciplinarity for the generation of innovative bio-inspired concepts or products.
The envelope is a concept that defines an interface between an internal and external environment. They can be ‘living’ (skin, hair, feather, bark, membrane of a cell) or ‘non-living’ (egg, animal architecture, shell) or man-made design (packaging, building facade, car body, etc). Nowadays, industry, architecture and product design are particularly interested in replicating the properties of biological envelopes in order to improve the performance of man-made envelopes (mechanical resistance, acoustic and thermal insulation, water and air permeability, etc.). However, these bio-inspired researches are often inspired by the same panel of biological organisms characterized according to a single-criterion approach. This research first presents a comparative analysis of bio-inspired building skins built over the last fifty years in chapter 1. The second chapter provides a multi-criteria analysis of a selection of ten types of biological envelopes of eukaryotes in terrestrial environment and on a macroscopic scale (skin, hair, feathers, bark, etc.). By classifying these organisms using several criteria of analysis (functions of regulation, time scale, size scale), this research enhances connexions between life and design sciences. The third chapter proposes a multi-criteria analysis tool for biological organisms allowing a systemic understanding of living beings in a perspective of biological properties transfer for a multi-criteria design. Last section of this research discusses the ethical aspects of biomimetics and the relevance of the acquisition of new biological data, the taxonomic bias and the methodological aspects of the approach in architecture.
Online access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03558596
Building skins should host multiple functions for increased performance. Addressing this, their design can benefit by learning from nature to achieve multifunctionality, where multifunctional strategies have evolved over years. However, existing frameworks to develop biomimetic adaptive building skins (Bio-ABS) have limited capabilities transferring multifunctionality from nature into designs. This study shows that through investigating the principles of hierarchy and heterogeneity, multifunctionality in nature can be transferred into biomimetic strategies. We aim at mapping the existing knowledge in biological adaptations from the perspective of multifunctionality and developing a framework achieving multifunctionality in Bio-ABS. The framework is demonstrated through the case study of Echinocactus grusonii implemented as a Bio-ABS on a digital base-case building. The methods include the Bio-ABS case study demonstrating the framework and simulating the performance of the case study and base-case building to comparatively analyze the results. The outcomes are a framework to develop multifunctional Bio-ABS and simulation results on the performance improvement Bio-ABS offer. The performance comparison between the Bio-ABS and base-case building show that there is a decrease in the discomfort hours by a maximum of 23.18%. In conclusion, translating heterogeneity and hierarchy principles in nature into engineered designs is a key aspect to achieve multifunctionality in Bio-ABS offering improved strategies in performance over conventional buildings.
Engineering design, as the science framing the practice of design through the elaboration of tools and processes, is constantly evolving towards new innovative strategies. To thrive in their extremely competitive environment, it appears that both industrial and natural worlds are highly dependent on innovation, optimisation and selection. These commonalities have led designers to look to living beings for inspiration. This innovation strategy, referred to as biomimetics, isn’t a new approach but its methodological aspects are still under development. This article deals with biologists’ contribution throughout the biomimetic design process. After introducing the context and the experimental protocol, we investigated the impact of possessing a background in biology during the practice of biomimetics and compared our findings with experts’ opinion. The main idea of this article is to show that to forego the integration of biologists is highly restrictive and may be one of the reasons explaining the difficulties of implementing biomimetics in the industrial context. Hence, this article argues for a new methodological framework taking into account biologists, allowing biomimetic teams to become truly interdisciplinary.
The Insects has been the standard textbook in the field since the first edition published over forty years ago. Building on the strengths of Chapman's original text, this long-awaited 5th edition has been revised and expanded by a team of eminent insect physiologists, bringing it fully up-to-date for the molecular era. The chapters retain the successful structure of the earlier editions, focusing on particular functional systems rather than taxonomic groups and making it easy for students to delve into topics without extensive knowledge of taxonomy. The focus is on form and function, bringing together basic anatomy and physiology and examining how these relate to behaviour. This, combined with nearly 600 clear illustrations, provides a comprehensive understanding of how insects work. Now also featuring a richly illustrated prologue by George McGavin, this is an essential text for students, researchers and applied entomologists alike.
Biomimetics is an opportunity for the development of energy efficient building systems. Several biomimetic building skins (Bio-BS) have been built over the past decade, however few addressed multi-regulation although the biological systems they are inspired by have multi-functional properties. Recent studies have suggested that despite numerous tools and methods described in the literature for the development of biomimetic systems, their use for designing Bio-BS is scarce. To assess the main challenges of biomimetic design processes and their influence on the final design, this paper presents a comparative analysis of several existing Bio-BS. The analyses were carried out with univariable and multivariate descriptive tools in order to highlight the main trends, similarities and differences between the projects. The authors evaluated the design process of thirty existing Bio-BS, including a focus on the steps related to the understanding of the biological models. Data was collected throughout interviews. The univariate analysis revealed that very little Bio-BS followed a biomimetic design framework (5%). None of the Bio-BS was as multi-functional as their biological model(s) of inspiration. A further conclusion drawn that Bio-BS are mostly inspired by single biological organisms (82%), which mostly belong to the kingdom of animals (53%) and plants (37%). The multivariate analysis outlined that the Bio-BS were distributed into two main groups: (1) academic projects which present a strong correlation with the inputs in biology in their design processes and resulted in radical innovation; (2) public building projects which used conventional design and construction methods for incremental innovation by improving existing building systems. These projects did not involve biologists neither a thorough understanding of biological models during their design process. Since some biomimetic tools are available and Bio-BS have shown limitations in terms of multifunctionality, there is a need to promote the use of multidisciplinary tools in the design process of Bio-BS, and address the needs of the designers to enhance the application of multi-regulation capabilities for improved performances.
Both organisms and adaptive building skins (ABS) respond to changing environmental conditions. There have been several systems developed through the synthesis of biomimetics and ABS to reduce energy demand or improve comfort in buildings. This paper presents the definition, characterisation and a comparative analysis of existing applications in the field of biomimetic adaptive building skins (Bio-ABS). We evaluate current uptake in the field, present an overview of the state-of-the-art and undertake a meta-analysis of fifty-two Bio-ABS applications to determine performance trends, opportunities and challenges. We found that current development in the field of Bio-ABS is limited. 53.8% of all published Bio-ABS remain at a conceptual stage of development, resulting in a gap between theoretical and real-world uptake. In addition, there is little quantitative analysis in terms of environmental or energy performance measurements, with only 44.2% of the projects considering these performance metrics. Of those that do, 78.2% demonstrate either thermal or visual comfort analysis while only five, 21.7%, include energy analysis. A further conclusion drawn is that the majority of Bio-ABS are monofunctional, only controlling a single environmental parameter. Very little attention is paid to multifunctionality, with only 13.4% of the published projects controlling more than one parameter. Multifunctionality in Bio-ABS needs further study to address multiple contradictory functional requirements of buildings regarding energetic and environmental performance.