Abstract
This paper presents an integrative approach to adaptive structures, which harnesses the scale and strength of natural material actuators such as wood as well as the functional physical programming of material properties enabled by 3D-printing. Passively actuated adaptive systems represent a growing field within architecture, and wood’s innate capacity for hygroscopic responsiveness can be instrumentalized for use as a natural actuator; however, the internal compositions of wood cannot be fully customized. With 3D-printing, it is possible to tailor the internal substructure of physical objects. We introduce a material programming and additive fabrication method for designing macro-scale objects with anisotropic stiffness and elasticity of varying magnitudes using functional patterns, and embedding natural wood actuators into the synthetic 3D-printed structures. In place of electronics and digital control, movement is encoded in the physical material and fabrication logic—demonstrating how self-shaping biohybrid components can emerge from a synergy of natural and synthetic materials.
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Acknowledgements
The research was partially supported by the Sino-German Centre for Research Promotion – GZ 1162 – and the German Research Foundation DFG under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2120/1 – 390831618. Additionally, this work was tested in a workshop setting at the Digital Futures 2018 conference in Shanghai. The authors especially thank Long Nguyen and Ahmad Razavi for their help in developing the system; we would like to also thank the students who participated in our workshop: Chen Cai, Yunyi Chen, Philipp Farana, Osama Hashem, Mu He, Kecheng Huang, Xiaobai Ji, Zhuoqun Jiang, Zeynab Kaseb, Tomas Vivanco Larrain, Siyu Li, Yige Liu, Jiaxin Nie, Yuchi Shen, Zexin Sun, Xuan Tang, Liu Yang, Zhefan Yu, Fei Yue, Tong Zhang, Qingyu Zhu.
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Cheng, T., Wood, D., Wang, X., Yuan, P.F., Menges, A. (2020). Programming Material Intelligence: An Additive Fabrication Strategy for Self-shaping Biohybrid Components. In: Vouloutsi, V., Mura, A., Tauber, F., Speck, T., Prescott, T.J., Verschure, P.F.M.J. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12413. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64313-3_5
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