̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Michael Ramage

Sowing seeds for timber skyscrapers can rewind the carbon footprint of the concrete industry

ehs33 — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 12:51:58 +0000

Recent innovations in engineered timber have laid the foundations for the world’s first wooden skyscrapers to appear within a decade, a feat that is not only achievable—according to the Centre for Natural Material Innovation—but one they hope will beckon in an era of sustainable wooden cities, helping reverse historic emissions from the construction industry.

̽��ֱ��research team based at the Faculty of Architecture, is interdisciplinary, composed of architects, biochemists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers, who specialise in plant-based material, including cross-laminated timber, arguably the first major structural innovation since the advent of reinforced concrete, 150 years ago.

Principal Investigator Dr Michael Ramage, said “Until cross-laminated timber, there was simply no building material to challenge steel or reinforced concrete. To construct cities and indeed skyscrapers, we just had to accept the good and the bad of existing materials.

“Concrete is about five times heavier than timber, which means more expense for foundations and transport; it’s resource-intensive, and contributes to tremendous carbon dioxide emissions. After water, concrete is the most consumed material by humanity. But now we have an alternative, and it’s plant-based.”

̽��ֱ��team envisage trees supplanting concrete as the predominant building material for cities, with buildings sown like seeds and cities harvested as crops, a way of simultaneously addressing climate change and global housing shortages.

Dr Ramage explained: “In England alone, we need to build 340,000 new homes each year over the next 12 years to accommodate our population. Concrete is unsustainable. Timber, however, is the only building material we can grow, and that actually reduces carbon dioxide. Every tonne of timber expunges 1.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Doing the calculations, if all new English homes were constructed from timber, we could capture and offset the carbon footprints of around 850,000 people for 10 years.

“ ̽��ֱ��sustainable forests of Europe take just 7 seconds to grow the volume of timber required for a 3 bedroom apartment, and 4 hours to grow a 300 metre supertall skyscraper. Canada’s sustainable forests alone yield enough timber to house a billion people in perpetuity, with forested trees replenishing faster than their eventual occupants.”

Various teams around the world are hoping to produce the tallest wooden skyscraper, however the team from Cambridge is confident they’ll be the first, having done holistic work on three proposals for timber skyscrapers in London, Chicago, and the Hague, all of which are set to be showcased to the public at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition 2019, freely open to the public from July 1–7.

̽��ֱ��team’s exhibit—Timber towers of tomorrow—will embody their vision, the stand itself modelled after a typical apartment nested within their proposed Oakwood Timber Tower at the Barbican Tower, where visitors can experience life in a treehouse while talking with the team, viewing architectural models of timber towers, learning about the fire performance properties of engineered timber, and hearing about the genetic, cellular, and macroscale innovations which have led to ply in the sky designs becoming a reality.

Beyond tackling climate change and promoting sustainability, the team are eager to outline the branching benefits society stands to gain by embracing timber architecture: the psychological well-being that comes from being surrounded by wood as compared with concrete, as well as the return to an ancient building material, that’s intimate as it is natural.

A bold response to the world’s greatest challenge
̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is building on its existing research and launching an ambitious new environment and climate change initiative. Cambridge Zero is not just about developing greener technologies. It will harness the full power of the ̽��ֱ��’s research and policy expertise, developing solutions that work for our lives, our society and our biosphere.

̽��ֱ��Centre for Natural Material Innovation exhibited their proposals for timber skyscrapers at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition.

Wooden skyscrapers: Sustainable homes of the future?

River Beech Tower Chicago

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

House of moveable wooden walls promising cheaper, greener alternative to ‘knocking through’, wins award

ta385 — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 10:30:00 +0000

House-owners the world over consider ‘knocking through’ walls to achieve more open-plan living or changing layouts to accommodate new arrivals or circumstances. ̽��ֱ��results may be impressive, but they come at a sizeable financial and environmental cost. But what if it wasn’t necessary to demolish internal brick and/or plaster walls and build new ones?

In June 2023, researchers at Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation unveiled 'Ephemeral', an innovative alternative using engineered wood, at the London Design Biennale. ̽��ֱ��team, including partners PLP Architecture, went on to win the Public Choice Award for EUREKA!, the Biennale's first showcase of design-led innovation from UK research centres.

̽��ֱ��project, led by Cambridge researcher Ana Gatóo, invites visitors to step into a home constructed around principles of affordability, sustainability, flexibility and adaptation. ̽��ֱ��flexible wooden partition walls – developed by Gatóo as part of her Cambridge PhD research – are made using kerfing, which allows wood to bend without breaking, the same technique employed in the construction of guitars and other stringed instruments.

̽��ֱ��resulting wooden walls are simple, resilient, foldable and movable, meaning they can respond to the changing needs of residents, for instance, as children are born or leave the nest; as age or mobility bring changing requirements; or as homeworking patterns change.

Watch a short film about the project

Gatóo says: “Self-assembly and modular furniture have improved so many people’s lives. We’ve developed something similar but for walls so people can take total control of their interior spaces.”

“If you have lots of money, you can hire a designer and alter the interiors of your house, but if you don't, you're stuck with very rigid systems that could be decades out-of-date. You might be stuck with more rooms than you need, or too few. We want to empower people to make their spaces their own.”

̽��ֱ��team’s ‘rooms of requirement’ provide elegant, affordable solutions which can be built into the fabric of the building from its first design, or seamlessly retrofitted – avoiding the mountains of carbon associated with demolition and reconstruction.

Gatóo says: “We’re using engineered timber, which is affordable and sustainable. It's a natural material which stores carbon, and when you don’t need it anymore, you can make something else with it. So you are creating minimal waste.”

Gatóo and her colleagues are based in the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation, a world leader in research into innovative and sustainable uses of timber in construction.

̽��ֱ��team emphasises that their system could be used anywhere in the world, in workplaces as well as in homes, and the researchers have already had encouraging conversations with industry, including with affordable housing developers in India.

Gatóo says: “I’ve worked in development and post-disaster housing with NGOs in many countries around the world, always using sustainable materials. When I started my PhD, I wanted to merge making housing more affordable and social with technical innovation and sustainability. This is what our cities of the future need – caring for people and the environment at the same time.”

Implemented at scale, this innovation could change the construction industry for the better, empowering people to adapt their spaces to their needs while slashing housing costs and overcoming some of the hurdles which the construction industry must tackle to be part of a sustainable future.

Working with Cambridge Enterprise, the research team is seeking industry and policy partners to further advance product feasibility for industry-wide adoption.

̽��ֱ��project is supported by PLP Architecture, ̽��ֱ��Laudes Foundation, the Future Observatory and the AHRC Design Accelerator.

Cambridge architects have won a public choice award at the London Design Biennale for a prototype home constructed with flexible wooden partition walls which can be shifted to meet the changing needs of residents. ̽��ֱ��invention aims to reduce waste and carbon while also improving living conditions for those who cannot afford expensive refurbishments.

This is what our cities of the future need – caring for people and the environment at the same time

Ana Gatóo

Ron Bakker

Ephemeral exhibit at the London Design Biennale 2023

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

COP must reverse rising pessimism over building sector decarbonisation

ta385 — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:05:00 +0000

Negativity on Twitter about decarbonising the built environment has increased by around a third since 2014, according to a new analysis of more than 250,000 tweets featuring #emissions and #building between 2009 and 2021.

̽��ֱ��pessimistic trend has followed the launch of major climate action reports. ̽��ֱ��study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, reveals that expressions of ‘fear’ in Twitter dialogue increased by around 60% following the launch of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2015.

̽��ֱ��researchers, from Cambridge, Boston, Sussex and Aarhus Universities and Caltech, also found that ‘sadness’ increased by around 30% following the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming 1.5˚C in November 2019; while debate in November 2020 over lobbying of builders and utility companies over non-compliance with new building codes in the US triggered a spike in ‘anger’.

Mapping tweets that caused spikes in emotional engagement revealed that public concerns triangulated around inaction towards emission reduction, the fairness of carbon tax, the politicisation of building codes (distinctively seen for the US) and concerns over environmental degradation. This demonstrates, the researchers argue, “a strong environmental justice discourse.”

̽��ֱ��findings appear on the heels of COP27’s building sector events (10th – 14th November), which sought to promote a just transition and enhancing building resilience with the tagline ‘Build4Tomorrow’.

Lead author Ramit Debnath, Cambridge Zero Fellow at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a visiting faculty associate in Computational Social Science at Caltech, said:

“Major climate policy events including COP have emphasised how difficult it is to decarbonise the built environment and this has been reflected in the rise of negative feelings on social media.

“But our research also offers hope – we found that climate policy events can and do foster public engagement, mostly positive, and that this has the power to increase the building sector’s focus on environmental justice.

“To build for tomorrow fairly, global climate action has to incorporate and empower diverse public voices. Policy actions are no longer isolated events in this digital age and demand two-way communication. Policy events and social media have a crucial role to play in this.”

̽��ֱ��study highlights that the building sector is one of the most important and challenging to decarbonise. ̽��ֱ��IPCC suggests that restricting climate change to 1.5˚C requires rapid and extensive changes around energy use, building design, and broader planning of cities and infrastructure. ̽��ֱ��buildings and construction sector currently accounts for around 39% of global energy and process-related carbon emissions. ̽��ֱ��International Energy Agency estimates that to achieve a net-zero carbon building stock by 2050, direct building carbon emissions must decrease by 50%, and indirect building sector emissions must also decrease 60% by 2030.

But decarbonising the building sector is challenging because it involves a complex overlap of people, places and practices that creates a barrier to designing just emission reduction policies. ̽��ֱ��study argues that democratising the decarbonisation process “remains a critical challenge across the local, national and regional scales”.

“Our findings shed light on potential pathways for a people-centric transition to a greener building sector in a net-zero future,” Debnath said.

Using advanced natural language processing and network theory, the researchers found a strong relationship between Twitter activity concerning the building sector and major policy events on climate change. They identify heightened Twitter engagement around developments including: the Paris Agreement’s call for the building sector to reduce its emissions through energy efficiency and address its whole life cycle; COP-23’s ’Human Settlement Day’ which focused on cities, affordable housing and climate action; COP25’s discourse on green/climate finance for residential homes; and COP26’s ’Cities, Region and Built environment Day’.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that despite negative sentiments gaining an increasing share since 2014, positive sentiments have continued to multiply as Twitter engagement has exploded. Across the entire study period (2009–21), positive sentiments have fairly consistently maintained a larger share of the conversation than negative sentiments.

̽��ֱ��study highlights the fact that core topics covered by tweets have changed significantly over time, as new innovations, technologies and issues have emerged. Hashtags associated with COP26, for instance, included #woodforgood and #masstimber, as well as #housingcrisis, #healthybuildings #scaleupnow, and #climatejusticenow, all largely or entirely absent in Twitter conversations between 2009 and 2016.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that discourse on innovative emissions reduction strategies which remain uncommon in the building sector— including use of alternate building materials like cross-laminated timber; implementing climate-sensitive building codes; and the circular economy – inspired Tweets expressing ‘anticipation’.

“COP26 was an extraordinary moment," Debnath said. " ̽��ֱ��Twitter engagement surrounding the event connected public health, the circular economy, affordable housing, and decarbonisation of the built environment like never before.”

“We are seeing a paradigm shift in the building emission discourse towards broader social and environmental justice contexts. Reference to low-carbon alternatives to concrete, housing crisis, scaling-up and climate justice are all part of the growing social justice movement associated with healthy and affordable social housing narratives globally.”

̽��ֱ��study notes that considering the size of Twitter’s current user base (around 211 million users globally), the number of tweets about emissions in the building sector, remains relatively small.

“It’s crucial that policymakers raise the salience of these issues and develop communications strategies to emphasise the importance of climate action in hard-to-decarbonise sectors like the building sector,” Debnath said.

̽��ֱ��authors of the study intend to continue to analyse social media interaction with further climate policy events, beginning with COP27.

Co-author Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston ̽��ֱ�� said: “Some people dismiss Twitter as a poor focus of academic research, given its ability to spread misinformation and fake news. But we instead see it as a lens into the inner workings of how millions of people think, and rethink, about energy and climate change. It offers an incredible opportunity to reveal people’s true intentions, their revealed preferences, in unbiased form on a public forum.”

Co-author Prof R Michael Alvarez, Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech, said: “This is an innovative and important study, showing how an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars can use big data and machine learning to provide policy guidance on how to decarbonize the build sector. Research like this is critical at this time, to inform the debates at forums like COP27 and to energise additional scholarly work that can help further our goal of democratising climate action.”

Reference

R Debnath, R Bardhan, DU Shah, K Mohaddes, MH Ramage, MR Alvarez, and B Sovacool, ‘Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector’. Nature Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41589-022-23624-9

Social media engagement with climate policy events is vital to reducing building emissions and ensuring environmental justice, research led by Cambridge suggests

To build for tomorrow fairly, global climate action has to incorporate and empower diverse public voices

Ramit Debnath

Brian (Ziggy) Liloi. CC licence via Flickr

People installing a living roof in 2012

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Brand-new Design Tripos brings arts and science together in one degree

sb726 — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 11:55:40 +0000

For the first time, the Design Tripos brings together architecture, engineering and materials science in a single degree. Blending technical content with design freedom, the course will offer a different kind of creativity, and a new approach to tackling societal and environmental issues, including poverty and climate action.

Using practices of design and our understanding of how they influence people, economies and the natural world, the four-year Master of Design (MDes) degree will be structured around hands-on, problem-based learning projects. Studio work and practical skills, including drawing, writing, coding, and fabricating, will complement taught courses in the humanities, social and natural sciences, and mathematics - bringing historical, cultural, ecological and economic context.

“It’s pioneering – we’re merging the arts and sciences under the umbrella of creativity and design, and constructing the course to be as open and interesting as possible,” said Professor Michael Ramage, Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation, and Professor of Architecture and Engineering in the Department of Architecture. “We don’t know of any other single degree course that brings these three subjects together like this.”

Delivering clean growth and a circular economy requires not just specific technical expertise but a holistic understanding of the world, said Professor Ramage, who points at the COVID pandemic response as an illustration of how rapid solutions arise from the confluence of different fields.

“Pressing challenges – such as achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and reaching sustainable development for all - are likely to be addressed directly as design challenges, rather than as separate mathematical or engineering challenges,” he said. “They don’t fit into a neat academic box; unlocking creativity requires collaboration and knowledge across a variety of disciplines.”

̽��ֱ��Design Tripos – which will start in October 2024, and lead to a Master of Design (MDes) upon successful completion – has been developed by the Department of Architecture in collaboration with the Departments of Engineering and Materials Science & Metallurgy, amid a growing desire among students in these fields to blend elements of each other’s subjects.

“We know there is general interest among students to apply their education to global grand challenges, and particularly sustainability challenges, which can be met through design,” said Prof Ramage. “But it’s very hard to study across disciplines - there’s no way you can create a degree like this simply by taking classes from those three different Departments, which are all in three different Schools at the ̽��ֱ��. That’s why we’ve had to design the degree from scratch.”

̽��ֱ��blended nature of the Design Tripos will appeal to a wide range of students, and aims to help address gender disparity in design fields. Over the past three years, fewer than 40% of applications to Engineering and Physical Sciences at Cambridge have been from female students.

Professor Graham Virgo, Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Design Tripos will teach both the ‘know-how’ and the ‘know-what’ to help develop the next generation of pioneers and leaders in industry, public service and society. ̽��ֱ��course is aimed at students who are thinking about global problems and want to learn how they can do something to help. We also know that employers are increasingly looking for multidisciplinary knowledge and team-working skills, and so the Design Tripos also anticipates the hybrid jobs of the future.”

A brand-new Cambridge degree - the first undergraduate course ‘designed from scratch’ at the ̽��ֱ�� for a number of years - will merge arts and science to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Unlocking creativity requires collaboration and knowledge across a variety of disciplines.

Michael Ramage

Yes

Bamboo bats... Howzat?!

ta385 — Mon, 10 May 2021 05:00:00 +0000

Cricket bats should be made from bamboo rather than traditional willow, say researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation. Extensive tests showed that bamboo performs better than willow as well as being more sustainable and cheaper.

Vice-Chancellor’s awards showcase impact and engagement during the pandemic

ta385 — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:38:48 +0000

Now in their fifth year, the awards were made in five categories: collaboration, early career, established academic, professional service, online and remote.

̽��ֱ��winners of the collaboration category are Dr Michael Weekes from Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and Dr Steven Baker from Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease. They collaborated to establish a comprehensive rapid turn-around COVID-19 testing platform for Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals healthcare workers, ̽��ֱ�� staff and students.

̽��ֱ��newly-established ‘online and remote engagement’ award goes to Dr Michael Ramage and team from the Department of Architecture for their HappyShield project. This involved developing, testing, and disseminating a novel open-source medical face shield to help tackle severe PPE shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, focussing in particular on production in Low and Middle Income Countries.

̽��ֱ��winner of the early career researcher award is Chioma Achi from the Department of Veterinary Medicine. Achi organised an engagement programme across Nigeria to strengthen the participation of poultry farmers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

̽��ֱ��winner of the established researcher award is Dr Duncan Astle from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Working in partnership with children’s charities, local education authorities, academy chains and local schools, Astle led an engagement programme providing teachers with robust evidence to help young people overcome cognitive and behavioural barriers to learning.

̽��ֱ��winner of the professional services award is Dr Rosalyn Wade from the Museum of Zoology. Wade reimagined the Museum’s learning and public programme following COVID-19 lockdown and the venue’s temporary closure. She designed and released a new blog and developed an innovative online festival (Zoology Live!).

̽��ֱ��awards were announced on 5th October by the ̽��ֱ��’s Public Engagement team on Twitter.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says:

“ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s mission is to contribute to society. One of the ways we do it is by undertaking research with real social, cultural and economic impact.

“These awards celebrate research that best demonstrates social, cultural and economic impact through engagement. From advances in healthcare and industrial processes, to rapid responses to the global pandemic; from cultural activities that recognise diversity in our societies, to new knowledge that improves teaching and increases social mobility. This year’s panel of judges was inspired and uplifted by the quality of applications.”

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards were established to recognise and reward outstanding achievement, innovation and creativity in devising and implementing ambitious engagement and impact plans that have the potential to create significant economic, social and cultural impact from and engagement with and for research. Each winner is offered a bursary to support their project.

This year’s winners and runners up are:

Established Academic Award

Winner: Dr Duncan Astle (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, School of Clinical Medicine) – Breaking barriers to learning in the classroom

Runners up: Dr Joseph Webster (Faculty of Divinity, School of Arts and Humanities) – Sectarianism in Scotland and the repeal of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act

Professor Peter Hutchinson (with Professor David Menon) (Clinical Neurosciences / Medicine, School of Clinical Medicine) – Reshaping the treatment of traumatic brain injury

Early Career Researcher Award

Winner: Chioma Achi (Department of Veterinary Medicine, School of Biological Sciences) – Strengthening participation of poultry farmers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance

Runners up: Emma Soneson (Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine) – Public health approaches to identifying and responding to mental health difficulties in children and young people

Dr Naures Atto (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies/Middle Eastern Studies, School of Arts and Humanities) – Endangered Middle Eastern Cultures and their Vulnerability in Migration Contexts

Dr Nicki Kindersley (Faculty of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) – Militarised political economies in South Sudan

Professional Services Award

Winner: Dr Rosalyn Wade (Museum of Zoology, School of Biological Sciences) – Learning and Public Programme of the Museum of Zoology: blending contemporary zoological research with active and online learning experiences for public audiences

Collaboration Award

Winner: Dr Michael Weekes and Dr Steven Baker (Cambridge Institute for Medical Research / Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease, School of Clinical Medicine) – A comprehensive COVID-19 screening programme for Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals healthcare workers, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� staff and students

Runners up: Dr Victoria Avery, Dr Melissa Calaresu and Dr Miranda Stearn (Fitzwilliam Museum / Faculty of History / Fitzwilliam Museum) – Feast & Fast: ̽��ֱ��Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 Research Project

Online and Remote Engagement Award

Winner: Dr Michael Ramage and team (Department of Architecture, School of Arts and Humanities) – ̽��ֱ��HappyShield

Runners up: Centre for Geopolitics (Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) – Centre for Geopolitics Coronavirus Response

Academics, students and professional members of staff from across the ̽��ֱ�� have been recognised in this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards for their work in areas including COVID-19 testing, PPE production and online engagement.

These awards celebrate research that best demonstrates social, cultural and economic impact through engagement

Stephen Toope

Happyshield

̽��ֱ��Happyshield face shield

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Innovative stadium will be the home of cricket in East Africa

ag236 — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 09:18:26 +0000

Some 1,500 people –including Rwandan president Paul Kagame— are expected to attend the opening of the country’s first international standard stadium on Saturday 28 October. ̽��ֱ��event will feature a match between teams led by former England captain Michael Vaughan and South African record-breaking cricketer Herschelle Gibbs.

Although cricket is one of the fastest growing sports in Rwanda, the country has not had, until now, a pitch that was appropriate for hosting international matches. Rwandan teams could only compete internationally by travelling to other countries, while Rwandan fans were unable to watch their own teams in action on home ground.

̽��ֱ��new cricket grounds in Gahanga, a southern suburb of the Rwandan capital, Kigali, are the result of a partnership between the Rwanda Cricket Stadium Foundation –a British charity—, the Rwanda Cricket Association, the Government of Rwanda, and architectural firm Light Earth Designs (LED), co-founded by Cambridge lecturer Dr. Michael Ramage.

One of the new grounds' most recognisable features is a pavilion consisting of three vaults constructed with 66,000 handmade tiles made by local workers using locally-sourced materials. ̽��ֱ��vaults’ shape mimics the parabolic geometry of a bouncing ball, and echoes Rwanda’s hilly topography.

These instantly recognisable vaults are the final product of research carried out by Dr. Ramage, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation, with Ms Ana Gatóo and Mr Wesam Al Asali. They build on Dr. Ramage’s earlier work alongside Dr. Matt DeJong (Cambridge) and Prof. John Ochsendorf (MIT).

Dr. Ramage and Prof. Ochsendorf had pioneered the pavilion’s characteristic soil tiled vaulting with architect Peter Rich of LED, at the Mapungubwe Interpretative Centre in South Africa. Adapted for the Rwandan context with Mr Tim Hall, LED co-founder and project lead, the vaults rise out of the cut soil banking formed as the pitch was levelled, integrating seamlessly with the landscape. ̽��ֱ��banking creates a natural amphitheatre with views over the pitch and the wetland valley beyond.

̽��ֱ��project is part of a 5-year initiative led by Light Earth Designs to assist Rwandan development. It aims to encourage the use of home-grown, labour-intensive construction techniques, thereby lowering the carbon footprint of local building projects, enhancing local skills and helping to build the local economy.

Speaking ahead of the opening ceremony, Dr. Ramage said: “the Rwanda Cricket Stadium embodies not only the spirit of cricket in Rwanda, but also that of the men and women who crafted and constructed the building over the past few months.”

Cambridge architectural engineer is part of the team that has built Rwanda’s first international stadium

Light Earth Designs

View of Rwanda Cricket Stadium

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Green method developed for making artificial spider silk

sc604 — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 19:00:00 +0000

A team of architects and chemists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has designed super-stretchy and strong fibres which are almost entirely composed of water, and could be used to make textiles, sensors and other materials. ̽��ֱ��fibres, which resemble miniature bungee cords as they can absorb large amounts of energy, are sustainable, non-toxic and can be made at room temperature.

This new method not only improves upon earlier methods of making synthetic spider silk, since it does not require high energy procedures or extensive use of harmful solvents, but it could substantially improve methods of making synthetic fibres of all kinds, since other types of synthetic fibres also rely on high-energy, toxic methods. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Spider silk is one of nature’s strongest materials, and scientists have been attempting to mimic its properties for a range of applications, with varying degrees of success. “We have yet to fully recreate the elegance with which spiders spin silk,” said co-author Dr Darshil Shah from Cambridge’s Department of Architecture.

̽��ֱ��fibres designed by the Cambridge team are “spun” from a soupy material called a hydrogel, which is 98% water. ̽��ֱ��remaining 2% of the hydrogel is made of silica and cellulose, both naturally available materials, held together in a network by barrel-shaped molecular “handcuffs” known as cucurbiturils. ̽��ֱ��chemical interactions between the different components enable long fibres to be pulled from the gel.

̽��ֱ��fibres are pulled from the hydrogel, forming long, extremely thin threads – a few millionths of a metre in diameter. After roughly 30 seconds, the water evaporates, leaving a fibre which is both strong and stretchy.

“Although our fibres are not as strong as the strongest spider silks, they can support stresses in the range of 100 to 150 megapascals, which is similar to other synthetic and natural silks,” said Shah. “However, our fibres are non-toxic and far less energy-intensive to make.”

̽��ֱ��fibres are capable of self-assembly at room temperature, and are held together by supramolecular host-guest chemistry, which relies on forces other than covalent bonds, where atoms share electrons.

“When you look at these fibres, you can see a range of different forces holding them together at different scales,” said Yuchao Wu, a PhD student in Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, and the paper’s lead author. “It’s like a hierarchy that results in a complex combination of properties.”

̽��ֱ��strength of the fibres exceeds that of other synthetic fibres, such as cellulose-based viscose and artificial silks, as well as natural fibres such as human or animal hair.

In addition to its strength, the fibres also show very high damping capacity, meaning that they can absorb large amounts of energy, similar to a bungee cord. There are very few synthetic fibres which have this capacity, but high damping is one of the special characteristics of spider silk. ̽��ֱ��researchers found that the damping capacity in some cases even exceeded that of natural silks.

“We think that this method of making fibres could be a sustainable alternative to current manufacturing methods,” said Shah. ̽��ֱ��researchers plan to explore the chemistry of the fibres further, including making yarns and braided fibres.

This research is the result of a collaboration between the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in the Department of Chemistry, led by Professor Oren Scherman; and the Centre for Natural Material Innovation in the Department of Architecture, led by Dr Michael Ramage. ̽��ֱ��two groups have a mutual interest in natural and nature-inspired materials, processes and their applications across different scales and disciplines.

̽��ֱ��research is supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Leverhulme Trust.

Reference
Yuchao Wu et al. ‘Bioinspired supramolecular fibers drawn from a multiphase self-assembled hydrogel.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1705380114

Researchers have designed a super stretchy, strong and sustainable material that mimics the qualities of spider silk, and is ‘spun’ from a material that is 98% water.

This method of making fibres could be a sustainable alternative to current manufacturing methods.

Darshil Shah

William Waterway

Spider web necklace with pearls of dew

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike