Unlocking the performance of bio-based materials with digital tools
Digital Modelling
Construction performance covers diverse metrics, ranging from energy efficiency to cost, site safety, scheduling and build quality. Some metrics are useful but don’t go far enough, others are misleading or inaccurate because they don’t account for different modalities.
For example, thermal efficiency measured by air tightness and U-values. These static metrics can’t accurately predict operational energy use and thermal comfort because building physics are inherently dynamic. Fluctuating parameters relating to regional weather and occupancy patterns interact with material properties such as the specific heat capacity, vapour porosity and hygroscopicity of different layers in a building’s thermal envelope. The outputs from dynamic hygrothermal analysis can point to very different conclusions in the design and specification of materials, when compared to statutory minimum targets.
However, it’s difficult to justify the cost of sophisticated digital tools, in modelling one-off projects. Whereas on a systems level, it makes perfect sense.
Bio-based insulation materials, and hemp composites in particular, have wider performance characteristics than plastic foam and mineral alternatives, meeting more subtle (but measurable) objectives such as reduced decrement factor and improved indoor air-quality. As we transition towards a new paradigm of material and energy constraints, our work in building physics circles around the challenge of optimising material efficiency, so that regenerative materials are used sparingly and to best effect. For this digital modelling tools are indispensable.
A systematic approach to building performance with bio-based materials uses a variety of different digital platforms, converging on practical, material solutions; allowing consilience.
These include emergent building information modelling (BIM) technologies facilitating cost and carbon transparency during early design stages. Architects can quickly produce multiple concept options; updating geometry in real-time against selected constraints, with parametric cost and carbon data outputs. Our digital kit-of-parts integrates seamlessly with these and other platforms using VR/AR (Virtual and Augmented Reality) helping developers to appraise sites more efficiently.
Conventional design development and cost analysis relies on a disjointed process, with early budgets superseded by detailed design information. Once contractors are involved, a fully developed technical design is often value engineered to conform with established sub-contractual arrangements and supply chains, in effect wasting already incurred design time and resources.
By integrating design workflow with pre-certified and validated digital components, teams can collaborate efficiently around unified and interoperable BIM platforms, de-risking the specification of high-performance bio-based materials with immediate and transparent cost and carbon certainty. Designers build detailed digital twins, machine-ready for CNC (computer numerical control) production; avoiding resource misallocation, duplication, and delays.
Manufactured Construction
Conventional construction suffers from chronic low productivity. There is a shortage of skilled labour, leading to cost inflation and delays. In the UK alone, the construction sector’s workforce has decreased by 273,000 since 2019 [1]. The sector is also responsible for the about 20-30% of all known serious occupational injuries [2]. Our goal is to meet these challenges with digitally manufactured construction.
Making standardised components with non-toxic regenerative materials, we target optimised PMV (Pre-Manufactured Value [3]) so that up to 85% of materials and components are processed in a safe, factory-controlled environment. Harnessing the full potential of lean manufacturing, we eliminate waste and optimize processes, to unlock efficiency, agility, and data-driven decision-making.
Traditional quality checks rely on manual inspections, prone to human error and variability. Data-driven quality control uses machine vision and automated inspection systems to ensure consistent, objective quality, while freeing up human resources for more strategic tasks. This not only improves product quality but also reduces waste from defects and rework. Digitization replaces static spreadsheets with real-time dashboards, providing granular insight into production flows, inventory levels, and machine performance, delivering faster response times, optimized resource allocation, and reduced lead times.
Embracing the human-centric vision of Industry 5.0 [4], digitally enabled circularity, together with distributed manufacturing, reduces operating costs by cutting resource consumption. Digital platforms connect teams across competencies and locations, encouraging creative, collective thinking and transdisciplinary collaboration. This empowers continuous improvement efforts; fostering a culture of learning and innovation aligned with lean principles. Seamless connectivity with suppliers and customers facilitates resilience, through just-in-time inventory management and optimized logistics; reducing inventory carrying costs, minimizing overproduction, and ensuring smooth production flow.
Project Delivery
Advantages in off-site manufactured construction are most apparent during the assembly stage of project delivery, with BIM platforms providing multidimensional information for accurate and rapid progress on site.
Conventional construction requires high levels of skill because working with raw materials in a wide range of site conditions demands operatives with specialised competence and experience. Moreover, relying on traditional 2D plans, sections and details, skilled workers are regularly required to problem-solve due to insufficient or inaccurate design information.
The on-site erection of pre-manufactured construction components has more in common with flat-pack furniture assembly, where dimensional accuracy and quality control is guaranteed before site work starts. Deep digitisation ensures the building is built exactly as designed; avoiding errors that confound conventional construction practice,often resulting in a gap between predicted and actual performance.
Operation, Use and Re-use.
Our kit-of-parts system is designed to facilitate assembly and disassembly. Each component is tracked with embedded digital product passports at every stage: production, erection on site, use and re-use. These provide detailed BIM data, manufacturing details, EPD’s (Environmental Product Declarations), together with operating and maintenance information, providing full transparency for customers and contractors.
Digitisation ensures that our buildings are not only designed for disassembly, but also adaptation and maintenance, so that panels can be individually removed and re-used. Buildings can be re-configured, extended or reduced without waste. Alterations and upgrades to mechanical and electrical services, for example, are made simple by easy substitution of individual components with identical pre-manufactured parts; incorporating service sleeves, ducts, and conduits.
These unique features open new potentialities in circularity and resource efficiency, promoting secondary markets around parts and components; commonplace in other manufactured goods. Optionality during service life means that our homes and workplaces can escape dysfunctional warranty arrangements. Instead, as with other engineered products and systems, extended cover is digitally enabled with maintenance support available via regional distribution hubs.
The true power of digital tools lies in their synergistic effect. Combining performance advantages of bio-based materials in construction with the untapped potential of Industry 5.0 offers to catalyse a paradigm shift in the way buildings are designed and made.
The built environment has unique capacity to promote the transition from economic to societal value; creating a sustainable, human-centric, and resilient future using emergent digital technologies. By imagining an alternative future, we aim to demonstrate that the current linear, extractive model of high environmental burdens, use and waste can be replaced with climate positive buildings, made from entirely regenerative materials, designed for the circular economy.
If you are interested in this topic you can read more in a recent article written by our Managing Director and featured in issue 9 of the Build Tech Magazine
References:
Financial Times ‘Construction industry bears the brunt of cooling UK labour market’ - October 2023
Eurostat Accidents at work - statistics on causes and circumstances – October 2023
Cast Consultancy PMV Technical Manual Version 1.0 03/21
Industry 5.0 EU Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2021, Directorate F.5 – Cotta, Breque, De Nul, Petridis
