Friday, February 18, 2011

Vanke Pavilion using natural wheat straw boards in 2010 EXPO








The main building material of the pavilion is straw boards made from natural wheat straw. In addition, the ventilation system of the pavilion makes use of both thermal pressure and wind pressure, which shall enable maximal natural ventilation, reduce the utilization of air conditioners and accordingly lower the energy consumption in the pavilion.

Meanwhile, the seven buildings all have skylights, which are installed on the top of each building and made of blue ETFE plastic films. These skylights can allow in the sunshine, accordingly reducing the energy consumption of lighting.

The open water area can adjust the temperature and moisture of the exhibition area, creating a natural and agreeable niche. The cortile formed by several exhibition halls will also provide visitors a comfortable space.

Vanke Pavilion will use the wheat straw board made of natural wheat straw supplied by Leenderson, offering another effective usage of straw and reducing consumption of the forest resources. When it is completed, the visitors can smell the scent of straw when approaching the pavilion.

Leenderson Panel Boards Holding (http://www.leenderson.com) is a newly established European company. Its Europeanholding is headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands. It holds an exclusive worldwide production license agreement with the Alberta Innovates Technology Futures of Edmonton, Canada for producing and selling of “Oriented Structural Straw Board”(OSSB) and MDF Panel Board.

By using Agri Fiber to create buildings out of OSSB Panel Boards Leenderson is building earthquake-resistant low cost housing, using OSSB in combination with Light Gauge Steel(LGS) and western construction methods while at the same time generating a new source of income for Chinese farmers and significantly contributing to the reduction of CO2 emissions by avoiding the burning of straw as well as reducing the bricks and cement production. All these aspects and the strong unique product parameters of the Leenderson OSSB create a high potential for The Low Carbon Economy.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Shenzhen Climate Analysis

















Shanghai 2010 Expo: Bamboo “German-Chinese House“



Designed by Markus Heinsdorff, the “German-Chinese House” is not only the architectural highlight of its Expo presence; it is also a forward-looking example for the use of natural construction material. It is the only two-storey building at the Expo whose load-bearing structures are made of bamboo.

Tradition and high-tech

The “German-Chinese House” was designed by Markus Heinsdorff, a designer and installation artist. Heinsdorff already constructed around 20 delicate bamboo pavilions for the previous stations of “Germany and China – Moving Ahead Together”. In China bamboo enjoys a rich tradition as a construction material and Heinsdorff made this material the hallmark of the event series. Heinsdorff’s buildings are modern, multifunctional rooms as well as works of art combined in one. They represent a symbiosis of natural and high-tech materials. As a construction material, bamboo is especially environmentally friendly and efficient in the use of resources. The grass grows up to 30 centimetres per day – faster than any other plant. Working with bamboo does not require the tree to be cut down. There is hardly any other material that is as elastic while at the same time as hard and firm as bamboo. Bamboo also possesses a unique charm.


Mobile and recyclable

The “German-Chinese House” is a bamboo membrane building with a walk-through surface area of 330 square metres spread over the two floors. For the roof’s supporting construction, Markus Heinsdorff used eight-metre-long canes of Julong bamboo, a rare and particularly long type of bamboo from South China. Before the actual construction, the bamboo was treated with a special fire-resistant chemical and has received a certification for fire resistance. In the interior of the building, the artist worked with glue-laminated bamboo segments. For both materials, new connecting and finishing techniques, which were developed especially for this project, were used. The supporting beams of the bamboo segments, which measure up to six metres long, make a self-supporting room possible on the upper floor. Connecting joints of steel on the roof hold together the bamboo supporting frame structure. They are set in HVFA concrete with a high concentration of flue ash. The roof consists of special PVC membranes. On the building’s façade, the bamboo has been combined with light-translucent ETFE films. The building is environmentally friendly and mobile: it can be taken apart and reassembled elsewhere. All materials are either reusable or completely recyclable.

Futuristic and multifunctional

The design of the “German-Chinese House” has the effect of being light, elegant and futuristic. It combines stylistic elements from both cultures. The roof surfaces and supporting beams in the interior remind one of bamboo fans or paper umbrellas, while the facade, thanks to its form and translucence, calls to mind a finely polished gemstone. The triangular entrances and exits resemble Gothic building forms. Both ends of the hall are open spaces. The house is covered with a white, shiny material that has been stretched between the bamboo canes and makes the house look like a beautifully lit lamp at night.

The building contains exhibition, game and conference areas. Along the longitudinal axis of the large hall on the ground floor, visitors can take part in an interactive city game. The first floor in four-metre height is accessible by a steel staircase, which is supported by a woven supporting pillar. Here, visitors will find an 80-square-meter-large lounge and conference centre, which is open to the roof structure. For noise protection, the room has been completely enclosed with 12-millimetre-thick transparent polycarbonate plates. Also on the upper floor are three oval structures connected to each other.


Shanghai 2010 Expo: Bamboo German-Chinese House

MUDI
Munich Urban Design International Co., Ltd.

T +86(0)21 6381 8852
F +86(0)21 6381 2082

shanghai@mudi.com

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Bamboo road bridge can support 16-tonne trucks



Bridges built from bamboo instead of steel could provide a cheaper, more environmentally sustainable engineering solution in China, a recent experiment suggests.

A novel type of bridge with horizontal beams made from a bamboo composite proved strong enough to support even heavy trucks in tests. The bamboo beams are cheaper and more environmentally friendly to make than steel or concrete, yet offer comparable structural strength.

Yan Xiao, who works at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, US, and at Hunan University in China, led the development of the bamboo beams used to make the bridge.
Instead of using round, pole-like pieces of unprocessed bamboo, which have been used as building material for many thousands of years, he came up with a way of assembling timber-like beams from many smaller strips of bamboo.

Precise details on the process remain proprietary, but Xiao says the strips are cut from large stalks of bamboo, arranged in multiple layers, and bonded together with glue. The technique has never been used to build such large beams before, Xiao says.

Sustainable harvest

Last week workers finished assembling a 10-metre long bridge of Xiao's design in the village of Leiyang in Hunan province, southern China.

Using prefabricated beams, it took a team of eight workers just a week to assemble and did not require heavy construction equipment. It proved strong enough to carry a 16-tonne truck and, and based on structural testing of the bridge, should be able to support even more weight, Xiao says.

Pound-for-pound, bamboo is stronger than steel when stretched and more robust than concrete when compressed. Also, stalks several meters tall mature in just a few years, rather than a few decades as with trees, so more can be harvested from the same amount of land.

Furthermore, since it is a grass it can be harvested like mowing a lawn - leaving the root system intact so that the plant can regrow.

Green solution

Bamboo beams could work for bridges up to 30-metres long, Xiao says, making them suitable for carrying pedestrians in cities or cars on highway overpasses.

"I think very highly of the work that professor Xiao is doing," says architect Darrel DeBoer, who works with unusual building materials. "It's quite worthwhile to find alternatives to the concrete that we are using way too much of."

DeBoer notes that cement production releases a lot of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide: 5-10% of global CO2, according to different estimates. This is an unavoidable part of the chemical process used to make cement from calcium carbonate.

Bamboo, on the other hand, soaks up CO2, as it grows. "From an environmental perspective, bamboo is a great choice," DeBoer says.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Bamboo Builder and his GluBam® Construction

As a child growing up in northern China, Yan Xiao loved flying kites. A born engineer, he made them himself out of paper sails and plain bamboo frames. The kites were durable and cheap. On a trip to the region’s vast bamboo forests, the memory of those kites gave the 47-year-old Xiao a flash of inspiration: Bamboo was strong enough for kites, but he suspected that it could be fortified to make even sturdier things, like bridges and houses.

Xiao, now an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, scoured textbooks and the Internet, hoping to find historical precedent for structural bamboo. His research had urgency. Most of China has been stripped of timber-worthy trees, so rural buildings are often made of shoddy concrete, which is exactly what led to the catastrophic school collapses during the earthquakes in Sichuan province in May. What Xiao found wasn’t terribly useful: a wealth of arty one-off projects, but nothing a contractor could ever build with.

At the USC Stevens Institute Innovation Showcase, held on March 28th, 2007, Prof. Yan Xiao’s innovative design of modern bamboo bridges was selected as one of the only three exhibitions. Professor Xiao spent his sabbatical leave in 2006 conducting and directing collaborative research at the Hunan University of China, creating ways to use the “giant grass” as basic fibers for making composite materials for structural applications. The new structural material is trademarked as GluBam®.

Prof. Xiao came up with the idea of using bamboo materials in modern structures, such as buildings and bridges, because of its huge potential for structurally sound, economical and environmentally-friendly structures of all kinds. With his collaborators in Hunan, Prof. Xiao designed and constructed several prototype GluBam pedestrian bridges and a truck-safe roadway bridge, which was awarded by the Popular Science Magazine as one of the Best of What’s New in 2008.

After the great Wenchuan Earthquake in China, Dr. Xiao immediately went to work designing and deploying bamboo shelters for the schools and villages in the quake devastated Sichuan area. In 2009, working with INBAR, one of the major international organization promoting bamboo usage and plantation, Dr. Xiao designed and built a California-style demonstration house in the famous Black Bamboo Park in Beijing. It is expected that even a partial replacement of current concrete or steel construction by natural and green materials such as bamboo would significantly improve the growing environmental problems of the world.







Bamboo is a remarkable material. Some species have stalks as dense as hardwood. It’s the world’s fastest-growing woody plant, and it’s an exceptionally good absorber of carbon. But its irregular, knotty form is a problem. Making a reliable bamboo structure used to mean picking through stalks to find the ones that met precise measurements. Timber, on the other hand, can be cut to standard sizes. So Xiao set about developing a process to transform bamboo strips into easy-to-manage beams. In 2006 he devised GluBam, bamboo timber sturdy enough for beams and trusses. Last winter, he returned to China and, using just an eight-man crew and no machinery, built a 33-foot GluBam bridge capable of supporting eight tons in the remote, ramshackle Hunan province town of Leiyang. The feat was so surprising, it was covered on China’s national news.

The bridge Yan Xiao built in Leiyang with GluBam was the town’s first. Each beam that spans the brick columns was created using Xiao’s novel process of transforming irregular bamboo into a practical building material. First he tore strips of bamboo from the stalk and arranged them in such a way as to provide the most strength. He then coated the strips with glue and compressed them in a self-built hydraulic press into beams, 33 feet long and up to three feet wide, each capable of supporting eight tons. Xiao says that the beams cost just 20 percent as much as imported lumber. Better still, rural China has a constantly replenishing supply of bamboo.

Since then, Xiao has been busy building GluBam houses and classrooms in parts of Sichuan leveled by earthquakes. But he hopes that GluBam’s most positive effect might be an overhaul of the bamboo industry itself. China produces up to a third of the world’s bamboo—Hunan a quarter of that output—but much of it goes to low-value, barely profitable uses, such as concrete molds and chopsticks. GluBam could spark a dynamic industry in China and provide a sustainable replacement for current forestry operations worldwide. “That was the intent all along,” Xiao says. “This could open a vast market. It could create a whole new source of money and jobs.”—Cliff Kuang



Read more:
http://www.glubam.com/
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~yanxiao/

Monday, February 14, 2011

Hygroscopic Climatic Envelope in Ancient Southern China:Adobe Buildings (Tu-Lou)




Chinese traditional residential building is a unique wealth in the course of human construction development. Research on the ecological experiences of Chinese traditional residential building can give a good deal of enlightment on the modem sustainable architecture practice. The adobe building in China is a unique residential building in the world.

The experimental results show quatitively the dynamic behavior of indoor environment of adobe buildings. Computer simulations using the written-by-author program have been executed with boundary conditions corresponding to the natural climate. Comparisons with experimental results and numerical solutions show good agreement with the proposed models. The simulation results also show clearly the dynamic thermal and moisture adjusting effect by interior materials of adobe buildings.

Building Skin Fabric

The membrane is constructed from 2 skins of PTFE coated fibreglass separated by an air gap of approximately 500mm and pre-tensioned over a series of trussed arches. These arches span up to 50 metres between the outer bedroom wings of the hotel which frame the atrium, and are aligned with the vertical geometry of the building. The double-curved membrane panels so formed are able to take positive wind pressures by spanning from truss to truss and negative wind pressures by spanning sideways. Additional cables have been provided running on the surface of the fabric to reduce the deflection of the membrane.