MAA 2010-11
Digital Tectonics
Marta Male Alemany, Victor Vina, Brian Peters
Students: Ayber Gülfer_Antonio Atripaldi_Mani Khosrovani_Andrés Briceño Gutiérrez
The idea to inject a fluid material to build underground structures like docks or pilotis in dunes is not new in architecture or engineering fields. This techniques using sand within a frame of a static and a rigid casting process where the way to inject the material is just to fill a hole drilled before.
We think that we can innovate injecting a fluid and structural material into sand using capillarity as a parameter to emerge a potential new geometry. Our intuitions are related to use sand as a medium to generate this new geometry instead of a cast.
From a theoretical point of view, the specific material behavior injected is directly related with the sand capacity to absorb it by capillarity. This phenomenon in physic is called as sorptivity.
Through this, we think that we can generate an emergent geometry controlling the specificity of this phenomenon.
At this moment we know by facts that the best idea to inject into sand is to build a machine with a very thin nozzle in order to avoid the natural pressure of sand through the process of dig and do not waste energy. In the same terms, use a low viscosity material is fundamental to achieve a sustainable process.
According to this, the parameters of time_speed of the injection, angle of the nozzle and the viscosity of the material are the most relevant data that we need to provide the machine in order to control the potential emergent tectonic through computation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_KX-eO9i8I&feature=youtube_gdata