CAREER: Mechanical Modeling of Living Building Materials for Structural Applications

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will establish a framework to describe the mechanical behavior of a living building material. This framework will represent a critical step to bring living materials into structural applications since it will identify the engineering parameters needed for structural design. This new knowledge will be applied in the demonstration of a living concrete alternative.

Introduction of living building materials in structural applications will address the environmental and durability challenges of current concrete building and infrastructure construction. The project will be complemented by establishing programs to promote broad student participation in mechanics research for structural applications. These educational and outreach activities will be designed to increase diversity in the science and engineering pipeline to help meet growing workforce demand and support cross-disciplinary innovation for infrastructure materials.

This project will provide a new multiscale cellular and granular material poroelastic formulation for a microbial precipitation-based living building material. Research activities toward this goal include: i) experimental study and modeling of dehydrated gel-wall material; ii) experimental study of the composite material properties; iii) formulation of a poromechanics model for the cellular gel-wall material; iv) formulation of a multiscale poromechanics model of the grain and cellular gel-wall material; and v) validation and demonstration.

The research outcome will be a material model that can be used to optimize the composition of living building material for structural performance needs and predict the strength of the material under specified loading scenarios. This project will advance the knowledge base in mechanics of building materials and will help to establish the Principal Investigator's long-term career in engineering microstructures to enable discovery of new structural materials.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.