Project Summary
Within the project Precast Concrete Components 2.0 (PCC 2.0) an interdisciplinary team develops novel circular economy processes to reuse concrete components of obsolete buildings. The project aims at overcoming linear material flows within architectural construction and avoiding further exploitation of scarce resources. The team digitizes and disassembles buildings and transforms them into refurbished components: PCC 2.0 – Precast Concrete Components 2.0.
Project Aims
Current design and planning processes are stuck in a linear notion of material use. Rare materials, precious energy and design intelligence invested into building components are too often hastily demolished and downcycled into inferior goods. Climate change, resource scarcity and an increasingly growing demand for future housing requires us as a global society to truly implement a circular economy. This project seeks to contribute to this inevitable paradigm shift.
Our interdisciplinary team of researchers and industry experts in architecture, engineering, surveying and building digitization aims at flipping the order of conventional digital-real process chains: While currently a building design starts with digital planning and subsequent materialization, PCC 2.0 starts from an existing, obsolete building and transforms it into a repository for precast concrete components (PCC). In a real-digital process chain concrete components, harvested from disassembled buildings, are digitized, refurbished and robotically transformed into PCC’s. Computational tools then help to aggregate the discrete elements into dry-joint structures that serve as both, buildings for today and component repository for future buildings. PCC’s are elements decoupled from the lifespan of a single building and rather circulate through time and space.
This project contributes to a more sustainable, resource-efficient circular economy in the construction industry while at the same time counteracting the increase in construction costs predicted among others by the German Construction Industry Federation due to a shortage of raw building materials.
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Project-Trailer for the research project Precast Concrete Components 2.0
Project Objectives
The team develops a digital circular economy platform that enables acquisition, design, management and logistics for PCC’s. A real-digital process chain linking existing technologies like digitization, planning, production and data management.
In the first step of this novel process chain FARO Labs is 3D-scanning existing building structures to identify their reusable concrete components. These components are then tagged by RFID technology and indexed as a digital twin by THING TECHNOLOGIES using a Building Information Model (BIM). ITE at TU Braunschweig produces the PCC’s by standardizing the deconstructed concrete components through subtractive post-processing. DDU develops discrete, graph-based computational design tools as well as combinatorial optimization algorithms to ensure a highly flexible reassembly of novel buildings made from PCC 2.0. A comprehensive, accompanying life cycle analysis (LCA), carried out by ENB at TU Darmstadt will allow an assessment of the method’s ecological and economic impact.
