Domestic Futures II

House of the Present

cbuster — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:05:28 +0000

Designed by Allmann, Sattler and Wappner the Haus der Genenwart or “House of the Present” was the result of a competition in Germany about integrating technology with modern living standards.

Blown up Metal Furniture

cbuster — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:15:56 +0000

Blow up sheet metal made into chairs.

Building Dashboard

cbuster — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:26:40 +0000

Your car has a dashboard — why not your building?

Plastic wrap for a house!

cbuster — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:20:33 +0000

Designed by KieranTiberlake architects, the Cellophane House reinterprets what it means to build a permanent house. As quoted on the KieranTiberlake website, “While we tend to think of buildings as permanent, they are in fact only a resting state for materials, a temporary equilibrium that is destined to be upset by the entropic forces that drive the physical universe”. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2008, for an exhibition titled Home Delivery: the Fabricating of the Modern Dwelling. The house consists of five stories, fabricated off site and then transported to the site for assembly. The house was approximately 1800 sq. ft., including two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living and dinning area, a roof top terrace, and a parking space.

Silicon at the micro level

cbuster — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:58:32 +0000

Another material worked on by Brevier Technical Ceramics is Silicon nitride (Si 3N 4) plays at present a dominant role amongst nitride ceramics. It achieves a combination of outstanding material properties not yet reached by other ceramics, namely

high toughness,
high strength, even at high temperatures,
outstanding thermal shock resistance,
remarkable resistance to wear,
low thermal expansion,
medium thermal conductivity and
good resistance to chemicals.

Coral patterned ceramics

cbuster — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:43:53 +0000

Brevier Technical Ceramics uses coral reef patterns and structure to create materials with extremely high heat resistance and conductivity. A few characteristics of Aluminium Nitride Ceramics are:

very high thermal conductivity
high electrical insulation

Heat pump physics

cbuster — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:50:05 +0000

The Natural Resources Canada website has a great explanation of how Geothermal Heat Pumps work to heat and cool your home.

parrafin used to increase R value of materials

cbuster — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:21:57 +0000

Thinning the brick wall but keeping it’s insulation capacity, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems is leading the way with phase changing materials or PCM’s.

“The new construction materials are of particular interest for lightweight structures. A layer of PCM plaster approximately 1.5 cm thick has the same heat capacity as a concrete or brick wall. “That means we can reap the benefits of lightweight design while still storing heat,” states Dr.-Ing. Peter Schossig from ISE. “Modern phase change materials help us to go a long way towards solving the problem of rooms overheating, not only in offices but also in portable prefabricated buildings and older-style loft apartments. Newly developed construction materials containing microencapsulated latent heat storage materials can make a major contribution towards enhancing buildings, especially when it comes to increasing thermal comfort and making spaces more comfortable,” Schossig emphasizes.”

build your own

cbuster — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:58:16 +0000

Building a large scale heat exchanger is relatively simple and straightforward.

Geothermal heat pumps green or not so green?

cbuster — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:57:46 +0000

“At first glance, the green credentials of ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) look unquestionable: because you’re harvesting free heat from the ground, you can get up to four times more energy out of the system than you put into it. Sure, it runs on electricity, which is more carbon intensive than gas, but because of this favourable ratio of output-to-input (called the COP for coefficient of performance) the system should still emit less carbon than a gas boiler – in theory.” Casey Cole

Figure 7: Components of a Typical Ground-source Heat Pump