Biologist-cum-architect Doris Kim Sung isn't pleased with the fact that thirty-to-forty percent of the planet's energy consumption goes into buildings. Unlike others who have similar complaints about such energy-deficient (not to mention environmentally harmful) building appurtenances as A/C, Sung has decided to do something about it.
Sung feels she has found a solution that is "simple" and "has been around for about a hundred years." That solution, Sung told Humans Invent this week, is the "ingenious idea" of enveloping buildings in a porous, "breathable" skin that would ventilate buildings and hopefully obviate the profligate need for air conditioning.
"A lot of the things that my colleagues were doing required some kind of energy," Sung says in the Humans Invent report. "They had some very cool ideas but I was looking for a material that would be smart but could just do it automatically. I looked high and low at all kinds of stuff."
Such "stuff" turned out to be "thermo bimetal strips," material made out of two thin pieces of metal stuck together. This valence of metals allows the "skin" a bicameral capability of expansion/contraction depending on the temperature. Essentially, the two pieces of metal will bend in one direction while hot and another when cold, permitting "automatic" and optimal ventilation of the building encased in Sung's breathable skin.
Though a building being covered in breathable skin may appear at first glance to be the stuff of science fiction, Sung points to the fact that technology long in existence is dependent on the skin's same brand of bimetal. The metal coil in thermostats, for example, is bimetal.
Sung is utilizing a "passive solar" method that will allow her skin to be used as both an "an automatic sun-shading screen" and as a means for "ventilation as a way to release hot air from the building."
Though Sung confesses that she's not certain if her breathable skin concept would totally do away with the need for air conditioning, her "definite hope" is that of reducing said exigency.
"If we could reduce the amount of air conditioning or heating used just by making buildings more passively designed then we have saved a lot for buildings," said Sung.
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