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Have building-size legos finally arrived?
The Institute for Civil Engineering and Environment (INCEEN) at the University of Luxembourg have signed a "memorandum of understanding" with the Suisse Federal Laboratories of Materials Science and Technology (Empa) of the domain of ETH Zürich to collaborate on research on energy efficiency in the construction sector.
As the building sector is generating a large amount of CO2 emissions, resource consumption and waste production, new eco-construction approaches are needed. Therefore, the first collaboration project entitled "Eco-Construction for Sustainable Development" (ECON4SD) will focus on the development of novel components and design models for resource and energy efficient buildings based on the construction materials concrete, steel and timber.
ECON4SD will bring together researchers from different civil engineering fields and architecture at the University of Luxembourg and the Empa Zürich, as well as from universities abroad in cooperation with partners from industry and consultancies in Luxembourg. One vision of the project is to develop building components that can be re-used after a building has reached the end of its life cycle and is disassembled. "The ECON4SD aims to turn buildings into materials and components banks and will allow producers of structural elements to come to a different business model. That would consist in loaning materials or components to customers and take them back after use in a particular building, in order to resell them directly, recondition or recycle them," commented professor Danièle Waldmann of the University of Luxembourg. "Thereby, the project paves the way for a future CE material or component passport comparable to the already existing energy passport."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday November 03 2017, @06:44PM (7 children)
I'm not sure this idea is the answer to that. What in construction can really be reused anyway? Look at cars for comparison: can anything there be reused? Not really: everything is completely custom to that model, so parts can only be reused among cars of the same model and generation (car designs usually last 3-6 years), or sometimes among cars from the same maker where they use the same parts across multiple models. But you're not going to reuse a door from a 1972 Pinto on a 2018 Honda; the idea is ridiculous.
Buildings generally are in use for decades, and technology changes; building materials from 1950 don't make sense to use any more, and some materials are downright hazardous (e.g. asbestos). Some things have a certain degree of reusability: concrete can be pulverized and used as aggregate in fresh concrete for instance. And old lumber is frequently reused for new furniture as the quality of lumber 100+ years ago was better than much of what we have now since the wood from back then was old-growth, so really old barns are actually somewhat valuable as sources of lumber. But in these examples, the materials aren't being reused as-is (i.e., no cutting or modification), which seems to be the idea from TFS.
The problems with "local tyrannies" is a lack of homologation (I think that's the word). The building codes vary a lot from place to place. Part of this is actually a good thing: a building that's perfectly fine in Maine is probably highly unsafe in southern California. Do you really want all buildings everywhere to meet the earthquake codes of California, or the hurricane codes of the Gulf Coast? Say goodbye to having eaves on your traditional-style house, even though they actually make good sense if your house gets rained on. And buildings that perform well (in HVAC etc.) in one climate can perform horribly in another. But some things could probably stand to be standardized nationwide.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Friday November 03 2017, @06:53PM (5 children)
You could re-use beams, interior wall panels, foundation corners, trusses, elevator-shaft components, etc. All it takes is good design and a will to standardize.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday November 03 2017, @07:00PM (4 children)
Interior walls are usually drywall. You can't reuse that stuff; it's so brittle that attempting to remove it will fracture it. Plus it's cut to fit; there's holes for electric boxes, it's cut around openings, etc. The labor to try to reuse it would cost much more than just using a new panel.
Reusing elevator components sounds like a good way to have an elevator accident and a huge liability suit. By the time an elevator is recycled, it'll be probably over 50 years old, and certainly not worth reusing; there wouldn't be any significant cost savings over a new one and it'll need extensive refurbishing.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:11AM (3 children)
I'm picturing standard-sized reusable panels with build in electrical, networking, etc. Plain, with windows, with door, etc.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:24AM (2 children)
And you think people will want to reuse these things after a half-century or more, and that styles and standards aren't going to change after all that time?
People deride US houses for being cheaply made and not lasting that long, but even here they don't get torn down before at least 40-50 years at the very shortest (and that's only in places where the land is very valuable, so someone buys up a property with an older 50s house in the city, and tears it down because they want to build a bigger, more modern house, not because the old one was actually that bad).
I'm sorry, but reusing networking is really laughable. What home networking standards did we have 50 years ago? Even 25 years ago? You can't even reuse Ethernet cables from 25 years ago, even though the plugs are the same: the speeds have gone up and they didn't have Cat6.
And windows? Have you not noticed that windows have gotten a lot better in the last few decades? Ones from 25+ years ago have much worse insulation properties.
This whole idea is like the idea of reusing parts from 30-year-old cars, or refurbishing 30-50-year-old cars instead of getting newer ones. Cars back then weren't just crappy and ugly, they had horrible fuel economy, unreliable engines, and terrible crash protection (no airbags, for instance), among many other deficiencies. Some of them are OK for collectors interested in their historical aspects, but compared to modern cars it would be really dumb of us as a society to hang onto those things; the highway death rate would go up greatly.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:48PM (1 child)
In the case of better insulation in walls and windows, etc, wouldn't re-usable, modular panels make this much easier? It's rarely done now, even though the energy savings might be significant. The old panels could be used for outbuildings or moved to more moderate climates for re-use. Just a thought.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday November 04 2017, @11:07PM
Now that's a pretty good idea: make modular panels that are easy to replace so you can upgrade. They actually have something like this already, called "SIP" (structural insulating panel). It's basically like what you say here: they're basically two engineered wood panels with foam sandwiched in between them, and they just fit together on the edges.
http://www.sips.org/about/what-are-sips [sips.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_insulated_panel [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:13AM
>... homologation ...
The word you were looking for is harmonization (of rules & regulations).