Project Portugal 2030

Summary

The project’s main goal is to create a versatile, eco-friendly composite steel-concrete panel with a free-form, curved design. This panel will be specifically designed for adaptable, demountable, and reusable building envelope systems. The research will pursue the following objectives: • Develop digital workflows for generating and optimizing complex envelope geometries through multi-objective evolutionary algorithms that will allow the segmenting of complex 3D surfaces in a system of panels accounting for aesthetic, structural and fabrication constraints. • Allow a flexible design that offers flexibility in adapting to different building sizes, shapes, and architectural requirements, allowing architects and engineers to unleash their creativity and experiment with unconventional shapes and designs, leading to visually remarkable and iconic buildings. • Develop green 3D printed fibre reinforced concrete, using waste materials to reduce embodied carbon in concrete production, with appropriate interlayer bond strength. • Enhance composite actions between free from steel sheeting and green 3D printed fibre reinforced concrete through innovative approaches. • Design, test and implement a demountable and reusable connection system between panels to allow the reusability of the developed system and levering the circularity of structural components. The project objectives are only achievable with breakthrough developments in free-forming technologies through 3D printing. Technologies already exist to free-form steel sheeting into arbitrary shapes without resourcing to standard pressing against a fixed mould. However, they need to be developed and applied to envelope panels and integrated in a digital environment. Providing adequate tensile resistance to thin 3D printed concrete elements is still a major barrier to produce efficient load-bearing structures and components. This project combines the technological implementation of 3D printed fibre concrete and steel sheeting into a single integrated process to achieve composite action. All these production and processing operations are performed in an industrialised context, in factory, only relying on an efficient connection system to assemble the individual panels in situ, which will also be developed in the project. The objectives of the project are specific, measurable and verifiable because the panels will not only be engineered, constructed and tested, but also detailed design guidance and a holistic sustainability assessment for their application will be proposed, and digital tools for their practical utilization will be provided. The objective is realistically achievable because it is based on i) past experience of the research team in similar projects, ii) specific technologies already existing within the current engineering knowledge and expertise of the partners.