When Biology is the Science Behind New Composite Structures

If you’re planning to attend the BUGA horticulture festival in Heilbronn, Germany in 2019, make sure you check out the new composite structure designed and built by the University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design and Institute for Computational Design and Construction. The two schools have teamed up to create an incredible pavilion that relies on biology to stay together.

The massive structure is made exclusively from a combination of advanced glass and carbon fibers. If you stand directly underneath and look up, you’ll notice there are no supporting structures. The entire strength of the pavilion exists within interaction of the two kinds of fiber.

For the record, the glass fibers are translucent. The carbon fibers are black. This contrast not only makes it easy to identify which is which, it also demonstrates the biology scientist used to create the pavilion.

Load-Bearing in Biology

Every living creature, including human beings, relies on a variety of biological materials for its physical existence. The human body is made up of a variety of tissues all held together by support structures. Take the skin, for example. The cells that make up skin tissue are held together by collagen. It is collagen that gives the skin its structure and elasticity.

You obviously know that there are no bones in skin tissue. There are no hard structures that fasten multiple skin cells together. No, all of the support for the skin comes from collagen.

Scientists at the University of Stuttgart borrowed from biology to build their pavilion. Using advanced computer software to do the complex computations necessary to get it right, they were able to create a glass fiber structure supported by carbon fiber in the same way collagen supports skin cells.

How They Did It

Understanding the principles of biology that made the pavilion possible is just the start of this amazing project. And by the way, it is a project that would have been impossible just a few years ago. According to Rock West Composites of Salt Lake City, Utah, the technology to build the pavilion didn’t exist until recently.

So how did they do it? They used a pair of robots capable of cordless filament winding. This is a process whereby chosen fibers are placed individually between two winding scaffolds. For this particular project, scientists used one robot winding the fiber filament and another winding the carbon fiber.

Precise calculations determined where each fiber was placed as the scaffold rotated. The computations had to be just right in order to create the kind of support that would hold the structure up. The result was a breathtaking glass fiber pavilion supported by black strands of carbon fiber.

Each piece in the structure is capable of withstanding up to 250 kN of compression force. That’s equal to the weight of more than 15 automobiles. Note that there are 60 individual pieces creating a structure that spans 75 feet and covers a footprint of more than 4,300 square feet.

Nature is a Great Teacher

Though the structure will only last through the summer, what scientists and engineers learned from building it will undoubtedly influence future composite construction. It turns out that nature is a great teacher. By utilizing lessons learned from biology, we can now create large composite structures that are extremely lightweight and self-supporting.

Some of the principles learned from this project will probably start showing up in architecture within the next few years. For those of us involved in the composites industry, there is a lot to look forward to.