Simulation of plant movements

The urgent demand for more energy-efficient and sustainable architecture is leading to a growing interest in adaptive building envelopes that can adjust themselves to changing external environmental conditions or internal comfort requirements. To date, these systems have been technically conceptualized by either rigid components or soft textiles joined along a straight axis of translation and/or rotation by highly strained hinges or bearings. These concepts have their limitations in building construction for several reasons:

• In particular, larger scale adaptive planar or curved structures, e.g. retractable roofs, are unique constructions designed once for specific functional requirements without prototypes or extensive test runs. The building is the prototype and has to function on the first attempt.
• Because of the growing interest of architecture in non-standard geometries, adaptability to a wide range of spatial configurations is of in­creasing importance. This is a specific challenge for medium-scale components such as louvers or blinds. Adaptation to irregular geometries can often only be achieved with additional mechanical complexity making them often expensive, prone to failure and maintenance-intensive.

For kinetic systems in building construction, the criteria of »robustness« and »adaptability« are usually of major importance, whereas other aspects such as as »accuracy« or »velocity« are of less relevance.

The project aims to improve understanding of the mechanical principles that underlie the movements of plant surfaces by quantitatively analysing their biomechanics and by simulating the movement and actuation mechanisms with kinetic FE models. The biological concept generators are selected such that diverse form generation patterns are included and various external and autonomous actuation mechanisms are covered. Variation of the geometrical and mechanical parameters in the FE models will improve insights into the evolutionary development of the form-structure-function relationship. In parallel, investigations will be carried out as to whether and, if so, how the mechanisms can be abstracted, scaled-up and integrated into kinetic structures for architecture that can be adapted to a wide range of geometrical and structural conditions. Technical implementation is based on the use of fibre-reinforced polymers with locally adapted stiffness through variation in fibre placement.

The project will develop a generalized and comparative methodology for the analysis, functional description, simulation and classification of movements of planar, curved and corrugated surfaces found in various plant organs and for transfer between biological studies and technical implementation.

Project titel:
Kinematic principles and motion design in shape-shifting plant structures (A04)
Funding:
German Research Foundation (DFG), CRC/Transregio SFB-TRR 141 "Biological Design and Integrative Structures. Analysis, Simulation and Implementation in Architecture ", GEPRIS project number 260964992
Project partners:
Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE), University of Stuttgart
Institute for Textile Technology, Fiber-Based Materials and Textile Machinery (ITFT), University of Stuttgart
Plant Biomechanics Group Freiburg (PBG), University of Freiburg
Researcher:
Renate Sachse