Sensing Materials for Smart Buildings

Shujuan Huang — Macquarie University

Title: Towards net Zero-emission buildings

Abstract: The past few years have seen severe weather extremes causing horrendous disasters including bush fires, droughts and floods. It is never as urgent as today to commit to climate goal by reducing greenhouse emission. To achieve this net zero emission goal, BloombergNEF predicted that around 70% of total electricity needs to be generated from renewables by 2050 with ~60% from wind and solar energy. This means that PV has to reach terawatt/year production scale, increasing its electricity market share from the current 5% to over 23%. This will be an extremely challenging task faced by the PV research and industry community. More diversified new deployment applications will be needed for increasing solar energy uptake. One example is building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV). The energy consumption in buildings is ~40% of the total energy consumption, significantly contributing to the greenhouse gas emission. On the other hand, these buildings can become net zero-emission by integrating PV to their roofs, facades and windows. In this talk, I will present how smart nanomaterials and technologies developed in my group translate built environment to on-site power plants.

Prof. Simon Clark

Title: Mimicking nature’s materials and structure in smart buildings

Abstract: Understanding the underlying processes of biomineralization is crucial to a range of disciplines allowing us to quantify the effects of climate change on marine organisms, decipher the details of paleoclimate records and advance the development of biomimetic materials. Many biological minerals form via intermediate amorphous phases, which are hard to characterize due to their transient nature and a lack of long-range order. Here, using Monte Carlo simulations constrained by x-ray and neutron scattering data together with model building, we demonstrate a method for determining the structure of these intermediates with a study of amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) which is a precursor in the bio-formation of crystalline calcium carbonates. We find that ACC consists of highly ordered anhydrous nano-domains of approx. 2 nm that can be described as nanocrystalline.

Dr Noushin Nasiri

Title: Durable and self-healing superhydrophobic surfaces for building materials

Abstract: The super hydrophobicity was inspired by nature such as lotus leaves, poplar leaves, fish scale, butterfly wings, water strider legs, peanut leaves and red rose petal. These bio-inspired superhydrophobic surfaces have the ability to repel the water because the water contact angle is greater than 150° and contact angle hysteresis less than 10°. Several studies have focused on the fabrication of artificial superhydrophobic surfaces, revealing that these coatings have tremendous properties that can be used in different applications. The applications are stretched into a variety of engineering fields such as building materials, electronic devices, microfluidic devices, biomaterials and oil/water separation. The detrimental effects of moisture for construction industry are not concealed to mankind as the absorption of moisture deteriorates building materials via physical and chemical processes. One of the solutions is to coat the building structures with novel materials to render their surfaces superhydrophobic.