Collaborative Research Center/Transregio 280
New materials enable new designs and types of construction. What sounds so simple is often a long road in reality. In the construction industry, innovation processes take a particularly long time due to high demands on safety and durability and because of complex standardization and approval procedures. This also and especially applies to high-performance building material combinations such as textile and carbon concrete, which will bring about a paradigm shift or even a revolution in building with concrete, the world's most important building material in terms of volume. Carbon concrete can significantly reduce the enormous resource consumption and CO2 emissions of the construction industry, but also open up additional functions. However, initial construction projects have made it clear that, despite the new possibilities, construction will continue to be based on traditional design principles borrowed from reinforced concrete, i.e. conventional materials will merely be substituted. Only in conjunction with intelligent construction strategies will the full potential of the innovative material carbon concrete be exploited in the future.
Design strategies for material-minimized carbon structures. Foundations for a new way of building.
While previous research projects have investigated the fundamentals and applicability of the new material carbon concrete, this SFB/TRR will explore new design strategies for carbon concrete with a total of 26 researchers. The goal is that the new material composite carbon concrete not only replaces the previous material reinforced concrete, but that new ways of construction are found that are specifically tailored to the properties of carbon concrete in order to be able to exploit the full performance potential of carbon concrete.
Methods for designing, modeling and constructing with new materials that are suitable for building materials require more in-depth fundamental research, a holistic approach. For carbon concrete, this means lightweight construction principles appropriate to the material. Central sources of ideas for innovative structural elements that transfer forces predominantly through normal stresses are botany as well as other construction-related disciplines such as mathematics and art. The development of novel structures is closely linked to questions of manufacturability, taking into account an accompanying product-related sustainability assessment and adequate further development of the material composite itself. The design strategies that have been identified as being effective enable a completely different design language. The new design strategies and material combinations reduce resource and energy consumption through hitherto unknown lightweight construction principles, while at the same time providing high serviceability, load-bearing safety and durability, and are also reflected in sophisticated aesthetics that can develop into a new "art of building". The long-standing research alliance of TUD and RWTH combines the existing excellent competences and will play an internationally visible pioneering role in the research of material-minimized construction with mineral composites.
The aim is to lay the foundations for the building of the future: completely rethought concepts for the design, modeling, construction, manufacture and use of sustainable resource-efficient building elements made of mineral building materials.
Spokesperson: Prof. Manfred Curbach, TU Dresden
Partners: TU Dresden, RWTH Aachen University, IPF Dresden
Funding amount: approx. 12 million euros
Project website: www.sfbtrr280.de