Architectural Materials Research Articles

Recycled Waste Materials in Landscape Design for Sustainable Development (Al-Ahsa as a Model)

When we think about sustainability, the most common understanding relates to the environment, economy, and social issues. Environmental art is increasingly becoming a medium to address environmental challenges that offer many opportunities when included in the work of sustainable development. The research methodology explores the relevance of art and design projects using recycled or waste materials in landscape park architecture for sustainability, helping to preserve natural resources and protect the environment. Additionally, designing a landscape park in Al-Ahsa Governorate using recycled waste materials will educate society about sustainability via artistic creativity. The applied side, designing a group of artworks, was completed using computer graphic programs and AI systems to improve the visual landscape’s architectural aesthetics through sculpture parks, public sets, etc. The result provides evidence that parks in Al-Ahsa lack artwork, color, and the application of recycled materials in landscape facilities which make a negative contribution to the quality of life of society. Using recycled and waste materials in artwork will contribute to a healthy ecological system and preserve natural resources. Urban landscape designers should consider the addition of parks, land formation, growing plants, artwork, and cheerfully colored furniture with other landscape architecture facilities, which will improve people’s moods and the appearance of cities.

Character-Defining Elements Comparison and Heritage Regeneration for the Former Command Posts of the Jinan Campaign—A Case of Chinese Rural Revolutionary Heritage

Rural revolutionary heritage in China represents a distinctive form of vernacular heritage. It holds significance not only for its connection to historical events and prominent figures, but also encapsulates the distinctive features of vernacular architecture. Since 2020, the present authors have conducted a survey of the rural revolutionary heritage in Jinan. The findings indicate that common challenges in this context are the issues of overprotection and low utilization efficiency. The two former command posts of the Jinan Campaign are representative of rural revolutionary heritage. The Yinjiadian command post building received the designation of revolutionary heritage earlier than the one located in Tangjiagou Village. However, it has undergone inappropriate repairs and alterations over time, which have compromised its original integrity. The Tangjiagou command post was granted heritage status towards the end of 2020, but despite retaining its vernacular architectural structure, material, and form, it has not been effectively conserved and utilized. In the present study, the history, characteristics, and current situation of the two command posts of the Jinan Campaign were explored using various methods such as historical data collection and analysis, field investigations, oral interviews, GIS analysis, and comparative research. The aim of the study was to determine regeneration strategies for the two command posts of the Jinan Campaign by identifying and comparing their character-defining elements. A comparative investigation of the two command posts in the Jinan Campaign was conducted and based on their different heritage characteristics and preservation status, regeneration strategies were proposed. Additionally, a systematic regeneration strategy for rural revolutionary heritage was explored, considering the unique challenges and opportunities associated with preserving and revitalizing these historic sites. Such measures promote the activation and survival of China’s rural revolutionary heritage while providing valuable reference for its protection and research.

Rescue Excavation at the Islamic Site of Umm Zweitineh in Central Jordan, 2012

This paper draws on the preliminary results of the rescue excavation conducted by the Department of Antiquities at Umm Zweitineh in central Jordan in 2012. The goal of the excavation was to take urgent action regarding protecting the site as far as possible. Due to budget constraints, the excavation work lasted for only twenty days. The aim of the article is that of providing a clear regional picture of the Islamic settlement through the seventh/eighth and fourteenth centuries AD through retrieving information from the architectural remains and material culture. The architectural relics and material culture were unearthed under a dense layer of wreckage and accumulated debris because of previous construction work at the site. The accumulation deposits yielded a ceramic assembly of daily life vessels dating primarily to the Umayyad and Mamluk periods. Earlier pottery sherds belonging to the Roman and Byzantine periods have been also uncovered. Ceramic sherds from the Iron Age II sporadically appeared on topsoil. Besides the ceramic, other metal artifacts, including bronze vessels from different periods, have been unearthed. The Umayyad and Early Mamluk settlements were distinguishable because of the distinct corpus typical of both periods. Possible evidence of a religion building belonging to the Umayyad-period Christianity have been unearthed in Area B.

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Design Alterations

Taking the past life of 718 Factory as an example, this paper explores the spatial transformation of old industrial heritage in Beijing and its current development; and how the cultural heritage of the industrial era can be combined with contemporary art that represents the "future style" in the contemporary context. The paper is a time-line analysis of architectural positioning, spatial planning, material utilization and other dimensions, which provides a reference for the transformation of urban industrial relics.

Machine learning or behaviour heuristics? The synergy of approaches to defeat advanced ransomware threats

This paper focuses on a successful and fruitful combination of machine learning (ML)-based approach and heuristics-based approach in the case of Advanced Ransomware Defence, where the advanced ransomware is the ransomware that maliciously exploits the trusted context of execution, so it is the case of ransomware injection into well-known trusted processes, system services, that are used for the disguise of the malicious encryption. ML is used for malicious or benign classification of call stacks that match injections into trusted processes. The heuristics-based technique is based in our case on just one of the examples of injections, using such API as CreateRemoteThread and WriteProcessMemory. This approach has been used with good results to the case of Ryuk ransomware, one of the deadliest malware weapons. We show how the ML helps to find those call stacks which match malicious injections with high probability. Then we augment the results of the ML classifier with the special detection of threads, created in the trusted process, using other sensors, including kernel drivers. This combination provides the maximum accuracy and the ability to remediate the attack. This paper also presents the architectural materials as well as the links and references to the hands-on demonstration of collecting suspicious stacks. We also show how to use ML decisions and pair these decisions with the thread creation events as the sensor examples. The links with demonstrations use the execution of the real-world Ryuk malware strain. The analysis of the events flow is also shown in the kernel debugger coupled with the case analysis with the help of other tools like Process monitor.

Study on Fire Suppression of Piloti Architecture Based on a Perception Survey of Fire Officials

This study aims to propose an effective fire suppression strategy for piloti buildings based on the fire hazard analysis of piloti building fires, analysis of prior research, and a perception survey of fire officials. The use of combustible building materials in piloti architecture poses a risk of rapid combustion, which may cause ground entrances to lose their evacuation function because of flames. Based on the results of this study, piercing applicators and cellar nozzles were suitable for use as a fire extinguishing strategy in pilotis with the aid of fireballs and thermal imaging cameras. Secondly, trios and quadruples were used to extinguish fires. Thirdly, fire suppression strategies based on the fourth industrial revolution, such as fire drones and fire robots, were used to extinguish fires.

Unexpected bending behavior of architected 2D lattice materials.

Architected two-dimensional (2D) lattice materials consisting of elastic beams are appealing because of their tunable sign of Poisson's ratio. A common belief is that such materials with positive and negative Poisson's ratios display anticlastic and synclastic curvatures, respectively, when bent in one direction. Here, we show theoretically and demonstrate experimentally that this is not true. For 2D lattices with star-shaped unit cells, we find a transition between anticlastic and synclastic bending curvatures controlled by the beam's cross-sectional aspect ratio even at a fixed Poisson's ratio. The mechanisms lay in the competitive interaction between axial torsion and out-of-plane bending of the beams and can be well captured by a Cosserat continuum model. Our result may provide unprecedented insights to the design of 2D lattice systems for shape-shifting applications.

Non-invariant elastic moduli of bi-level architected lattice materials through programmed domain discontinuity

Effective elastic moduli of lattice-based materials are one of the most crucial parameters for the adoption of such artificial microstructures in advanced mechanical and structural systems as per various application-specific demands. In conventional naturally occurring materials, these elastic moduli remain invariant under tensile and compressive normal modes or clock-wise and anti-clock-wise shear modes. Here we introduce programmed domain discontinuities in the cell walls of the unit-cells of lattice metamaterials involving a bi-level microstructural design to achieve non-invariant elastic moduli under tensile and compressive normal modes or clock-wise and anti-clock-wise shear modes. More interestingly, such non-invariance can be realized in the linear small deformation regime and the elastic moduli can be tailored to have higher or lower value in any mode compared to the other depending on the placement and intensity of the discontinuities in a programmable paradigm. We have derived an efficient analytical framework for the effective elastic moduli of lattice materials taking into account the influence of domain discontinuity. The axial and shear deformations at the beam level are considered along with bending deformation in the proposed analytical expressions. The numerical results ascertain that the domain discontinuities, in conjunction with unit cell level geometric parameters, can impact the effective elastic constants significantly under different modes of far-field stresses. It is further revealed that the degree of auxeticity of such lattices can be programmed to have target values (including non-invariance under different modes of deformation) as a function of the intensity and location of domain discontinuity when axial and shear deformations are included at the beam level. Realization of the unusual non-invariant elastic moduli of bi-level architected lattice materials would lead to a range of technologically demanding niche applications where one mode of deformation requires more or less force to deform compared to the opposite mode. Besides being able to perform as a load-bearing component, the proposed metamaterial can be used as an integrated sensor for measuring the level of stress or strain in structures.

Prediction and control of fracture paths in disordered architected materials using graph neural networks

Architected materials typically rely on regular periodic patterns to achieve improved mechanical properties such as stiffness or fracture toughness. Here we introduce a class of irregular cellular materials with engineered topological and geometrical disorder, which represents a shift from conventional designs. We first develop a graph learning model for predicting the fracture path in these architected materials. The model employs a graph convolution for spatial message passing and a gated recurrent unit architecture for temporal dependence. Once trained on data gleaned from experimentally validated elastoplastic beam finite element analyses, the learned model produces accurate predictions overcoming the need for expensive finite element calculations. We finally leverage the trained model in combination with a downstream optimization scheme to generate optimal architectures that maximize the crack path length and, hence, the associated fracture energy.

Accelerated Design of Architected Materials with Multifidelity Bayesian Optimization

In this work, we present a multifidelity Bayesian optimization framework for designing architected materials with optimal energy absorption during compression. Data from both physical experiments (high fidelity) and numerical simulations (low fidelity) are fed in parallel to train the surrogate model, which iteratively decides the next sets of experiments and simulations to run in order to find the optimal structural parameters. We show that having multifidelity data sources allows the optimization framework to find the optimum after fewer iterations relative to using a single high-fidelity source. This saves both material costs and time in the optimization process. Finally, we also apply constraints (on relative density and stress variations) to the optimization process, finding optimal structures within the bounds of the constraints. This framework can be translated to other problems that require complex, high-fidelity, labor-intensive experiments while automating low-fidelity simulations.

Five Frameworks to Approaching Architectural Materials Research

Five Frameworks to Approaching Architectural Materials Research

Designing architected materials for mechanical compression via simulation, deep learning, and experimentation

Architected materials can achieve enhanced properties compared to their plain counterparts. Specific architecting serves as a powerful design lever to achieve targeted behavior without changing the base material. Thus, the connection between architected structure and resultant properties remains an open field of great interest to many fields, from aerospace to civil to automotive applications. Here, we focus on properties related to mechanical compression, and design hierarchical honeycomb structures to meet specific values of stiffness and compressive stress. To do so, we employ a combination of techniques in a singular workflow, starting with molecular dynamics simulation of the forward design problem, augmenting with data-driven artificial intelligence models to address the inverse design problem, and verifying the behavior of de novo structures with experimentation of additively manufactured samples. We thereby demonstrate an approach for architected design that is generalizable to multiple material properties and agnostic to the identity of the base material.

Innovations in Architectural Design, Materials, and Constructability

Because of the rapid development of social economy and urbanization, people's quality of life has been significantly improved, while people's requirements for housing construction. The requirements of space and environment are also increasing. To effectively meet people's needs, it is necessary to dig deeper into the functions of buildings, increase innovation, promote the integration of architecture and structure, and increase the development growth and to contribute a high level of construction building design. This paper discusses the application of structural design innovation in architectural design, discusses architectural structure design principles, and discusses design innovation countermeasures from the level of integration of architecture and structure in order to promote the further development of the construction industry.

Mycelium-grown composites as a multidisciplinary way for the development of innovative materials for design and architecture

Mycelium-grown composites, also referred to as “myco-composites”, have raised a large attention in recent years, for their ongoing transformation into technical materials, in search of an adequate positioning and role in the field of architecture and design.

Modular shape-switching architected materials toward programmable acoustic properties

Next-generation acoustic devices and systems have utilized the recent advances in shape-switching and reconfigurable origami-inspired architected materials. Motivated by those efforts, we herein develop a hybrid material design strategy by combining two types of architected materials for their potential applications in tunable acoustic diffusion. The bilayered modular material consists of bistable/multistable blocks as the actuation layer and the origami sheet as the function layer. Guided by numerical simulations and physical prototyping, we proved the feasibility of controllable acoustic properties induced by programmable shape-switching sequences and customized corrugations in prototypes of linear units and planar units. Such programmability could offer the on-demand modification of scattering field directivity and variation of diffusion coefficients at various states compared to their traditional fixed counterparts. Overall, the proposed strategy opens the route to developing acoustic devices and systems with tailorable properties at different length scales.

The Use of Smart Materials in Architecture: Nitinol-based Foldable Façade Systems

The Use of Smart Materials in Architecture: Nitinol-based Foldable Façade Systems

A comprehensive investigation of compressive behavior of architectured materials based on topologically interlocking structures: Experimental and numerical approaches

Topologically Interlocked Materials (TIMs) are a part of architectured materials, which could impressively overcome several limitations of monolithic plates such as crack propagation. A critical requirement for these bio-inspired structures is the existence of a compressive loading that may have a side influence on plates made of TIMs, if it gets close enough to the buckling critical force of the plates. In the current study, buckling instability of these plates are investigated using a combination of mechanical testing on 3D printed samples and finite element analysis. According to the results, despite the fact that the segmentation of monolithic plates with constant aspect ratios, reduces the stiffness of the entire structure, the range of their variations can increase up to more than double. In addition, this observation has demonstrated that the geometry of block individually, can increase the buckling resistance of plates up to 3 times or may even reverse their behavior completely with respect to the number of blocks. Moreover, obtained results have shown that the failure of architectured plates is much more dependent on the blocks’ material in comparison with the frictional coefficient.

A computational building block approach towards multiscale architected materials analysis and design with application to hierarchical metal metamaterials

In this study we report a computational approach towards multiscale architected materials analysis and design. A particular challenge in modeling and simulation of materials, and especially the development of hierarchical design approaches, has been to identify ways by which complex multi-level material structures can be effectively modeled. One way to achieve this is to use coarse-graining approaches, where physical relationships can be effectively described with reduced dimensionality. In this paper we report an integrated deep neural network architecture that first learns coarse-grained representations of complex hierarchical microstructure data via a discrete variational autoencoder and then utilizes an attention-based diffusion model solve both forward and inverse problems, including a capacity to solve degenerate design problems. As an application, we demonstrate the method in the analysis and design of hierarchical highly porous metamaterials within the context of nonlinear stress–strain responses to compressive deformation. We validate the mechanical behavior and mechanisms of deformation using embedded-atom molecular dynamics simulations carried out for copper and nickel, showing good agreement with the design objectives.

An origami-inspired design of highly efficient cellular cushion materials

Current architectured cellular cushion materials rely mainly on damage and/or unpredictable collapse of their unit cells to absorb and dissipate energy under impact. This prevents shape recovery and produces undesirable force fluctuations that limit reusability and reduce energy absorption efficiency. Here, we propose to combine advanced manufacturing technologies with Origami principles to create a new class of architectured cellular viscoelastic cushion material which combines low weight and high energy absorption efficiency with damage resistance and full behavior customization. Each unit cell in the proposed material is inspired by the Kresling Origami topology, which absorbs impact energy by gracefully folding the different interfaces forming the cell to create axial and rotational motions. A large part of the absorbed energy is then dissipated through viscoelasticity and friction between the interfaces. The result is a nearly ideal cushion material exhibiting high energy absorbing efficiency (∼ 70%) combined with high energy dissipation (94% of the absorbed energy). The material is also tunable for optimal performance, reliable despite successive impact events, and achieves full shape recovery.

A numerical two-scale approach for nonlinear hyperelastic beams and beam networks

We introduce a numerical framework for modeling hyperelastic slender trusses, oftentimes used as elementary building blocks in architected materials, which accounts for both the geometric nonlinearity inherent in thin structures and the nonlinear constitutive behavior of the base material. Akin to the FE2 method in homogenization, our approach is based on a formal, two-scale expansion. We decompose the three-dimensional (3D) description of a slender structure into a macroscale problem solving for the deformation of the beam center-line (based on an effective strain energy density, which depends on the stretching, bending, and torsional strains of the beam’s center-line) and a series of two-dimensional (2D) microscale boundary value problems (defined over the beam cross-section). We solve a series of 2D problems (covering a range of macroscopic strain combinations) for a given cross-sectional geometry and material distribution in an offline, pre-processing step. Using this pre-computed energy landscape, we solve the macroscopic boundary value problem within a geometrically exact, nonlinear discrete beam framework. We demonstrate the accuracy of this approach through a set of benchmark problems highlighting the nonlinear effects of the cross-sectional geometry and constitutive material, including material heterogeneity and pre-strains. We further illustrate how this technique is applied to truss-based architected materials consisting of networks of slender struts, which are typically made of polymeric base materials and thus allow for large nonlinear elastic deformation.