Construction using concrete reinforced with renewable materials

Tomorrow's building material is here today. Textile-reinforced concrete (TRC) is durable, formable in diverse shapes and suitable for lightweight construction. As the name suggests, conventional TRC is reinforced with carbon ...

Building bricks on the moon from lunar dust

In the coming decades, many space agencies hope to conduct crewed missions to the moon and even establish outposts there. In fact, between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), Roscosmos, and the Indian and Chinese space ...

From pine cones to an adaptive shading system

An adjustable shading system that adapts itself independently over the course of the day, without sensors or motors and largely maintenance-free? It really is possible: an ETH doctoral student at the Institute for Building ...

Clean through solar power

In combination with the right materials, sunbeams can work wonders: they clean building facades and decompose pollutants from the air or in the water. The magic word is photocatalysis. In practice, though, the effectiveness ...

Insulating bricks with microscopic bubbles

The better a building is insulated, the less heat is lost in winter—and the less energy is needed to achieve a comfortable room temperature. The Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) regularly raises the requirements for ...

Particle size matters for porous building blocks

Porous particles of calcium and silicate show potential as building blocks for a host of applications like self-healing materials, bone-tissue engineering, drug delivery, insulation, ceramics and construction materials, according ...

With the right tools, we can mine cities

From 1900 to 2010, the amount of materials accumulated in buildings and infrastructure across the world increased 23-fold. We are depleting our resources at unprecedented rates. Instead of extracting dwindling raw materials ...

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