Project Summary
Our long-term vision is to dramatically improve whole life construction sector sustainability and productivity by creating a culture that takes a fresh, holistic approach to the manufacture, assembly, reuse, and deconstruction of concrete buildings, leading to a healthier, safer, built environment.
Currently, up to half of the concrete used in buildings is unnecessary, and is only there because it is shaped using planar formwork, used since Roman times. This leads to inefficient prismatic shapes for the beams, columns and floor-slabs, which is wasteful, architecturally constraining and a major driver of embodied emissions in construction. This need not be the case. Concrete is initially a liquid and can form structures of any shape, given the right mould. By moving the construction of concrete buildings off-site, to a highly automated, quality controlled environment, and using robotics to create optimised non-prismatic formwork, our buildings can become more sustainable and the construction industry more productive.
ACORN's approach builds on the well-established computational design expertise of the team, who have developed innovative digital tools and techniques to optimise the shape, layout, structure and façade of buildings during the design phase. It will extend this approach downstream in the building process, to encompass fabrication.
The novelty here lies in the creation of integrated end-to-end digital processes to automate the design and manufacture of non-prismatic building elements. It capitalises on the recent proliferation of affordable robotics, and brings them into an industry ripe for a step-change in sustainability and productivity.
Something as simple as allowing beams, columns and floor-slabs to have the shape they need to do their job, rather than the shape they need to be easily formed, allows a complete rethink of the way material is used in our buildings. We can begin to ask questions like what shape should they be, what material should we make them from, how can we reinforce the elements efficiently, how can we take into account whole-life value and how should we organise our design processes to take advantage? ACORN will answer all of these questions.
(Source: UKRI Gateway to Research)
Objectives
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE
The primary objective of ACORN is to drive acceptance of a new culture in the construction industry. One that embraces the concept of using enough material - and no more - in order to enhance sector-wide sustainability and productivity.
We will achieve this by fusing digital and physical realms, culminating in a prototype structure.
ACORN aims to deliver against the Construction 2025 objectives:
50% lower emissions
33% lower costs
50% faster delivery
50% improvement in exports
Read more about Construction 2025 and Transforming Construction.
Digital
On the digital side, our primary objectives are:
To combine structural design and analysis methods with optimisation routines that can propose the external geometry and internal reinforcement arrangement required to meet user-defined performance requirements.
To coherently link these novel design methods to appropriate robotic manufacturing processes, establishing key computational tools for constructability that consider automated manufacturing and whole-life value as an embedded part of the design process.
Supporting these, we aim to:
Reduce carbon intensity by only placing material where it is needed.
Work with end-users to ensure these computational tools can be seamlessly embedded in the design and fabrication processes, whether they are adaptations of existing processes, or are newly developed by this project.
And as a result, the digital making will help us to:
Propose feasible construction solutions for buildings with automatically manufactured elements of non-standard geometry.
Physical
On the physical side, our primary objectives are:
To fully automate the manufacturing process, including formwork, reinforcement placement and sensor integration, thereby upskilling labour, reducing construction time, and eradicating worker-related safety risks.
To continuously prototype new manufacturing techniques for the fabrication of concrete elements, both in the lab and onsite, using embedded sensors to understand performance and to improve the design and manufacturing process.
Supporting these, we aim to:
Enhance the durability and resilience of infrastructure through the development of novel materials that are well suited to automated manufacturing techniques.
Develop an understanding of how whole life cost, design value, carbon intensity and productivity should be defined and measured, and to introduce such calculation into the procedures of computational design in an embedded and automated manner.
And as a result, the physical making will help us to:
Take a fresh look at the entire building design process and identify ways in which it might need to change to realise the full benefits of automated concrete construction.