DARPA’s ELM developing Living Structural Materials for self growing & self repairable smart buildings and smart military bases on demand

The cities of today are built with concrete and steel between they are responsible for as much as a tenth of worldwide carbon emissions. Before they ever reach a construction site, both steel and concrete must be processed at very high temperatures – which take a lot of energy. And yet, our cities are completely dependent on these two unsustainable materials. In addition Concrete erodes. Time and stress and the mere passive forces of being outside pull apart and chip away at stone. In remote or vulnerable environments, where supplies are hard to come by but rocket or mortar attacks are possible, stone structures that protect people may be under more strain.

Researchers have now turned to biology for design of next generation smart materials for structures to support an ever-expanding population, while keeping carbon emissions under control. Bioengineer Dr Michelle Oyen of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering is working in the field of biomimetics and with funding support from the US Army Corps of Engineers, is constructing small samples of artificial bone and eggshell, which could be used as medical implants, or even be scaled up and used as low-carbon building materials.

A team of interdisciplinary researchers at UCLA has been working on developing a new building material made by capturing carbon from power plant smokestacks and fabricating them using 3D printers. “This technology could change the economic incentives associated with these power plants in their operations and turn the smokestack flue gas into a resource countries can use, to build up their cities, extend their road systems,” DeShazo said. “It takes what was a problem and turns it into a benefit in products and services that are going to be very much needed and valued in places like India and China.”

DOD and the military services own and operate hundreds of thousands of buildings and other structures across more than 5,000 locations in support of their various defense-related missions. Those installations are located throughout the United States and the world and are subject to a wide range of geographic and climatic conditions. The structural materials that are currently used to construct homes, buildings, and infrastructure are expensive to produce and transport, wear out due to age and damage, and have limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. As a result, the energy and financial costs of building and infrastructure construction and repair, to both the DoD and the nation, are enormous.

Now, Darpa is looking to new methods inspired from Living biological materials, such as bone, skin, bark, and coral, for example that have attributes that provide advantages over the non-living materials people build with, in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings. The inclusion of living materials in human-built environments could offer significant benefits; however, today scientists and engineers are unable to easily control the size and shape of living materials in ways that would make them useful for construction.