The Bamboo Builder & The Exotic Wind Farmers

Today I am bringing you two stories of developments revolving around eco-consciousness that show how innovative and beautiful the green world of the future can be. These stories come from my subscription to the popular science magazine and are supplemented with some addition research material and pictures I found online. The first story was originally created by Cliff Kuang, the second part is form official news sources in Bahrain. I hope you enjoy and have lots of comments

The Bamboo Builder

Bamboo Builder

Yan Xiao found a way to turn China’s abundant and fast-growing bamboo fields into buildings and bridges

As a child growing up in northern China, Yan Xiao loved flying kites. A born engineer, he made them himself out of paper sails and plain bamboo frames. The kites were durable and cheap. Xiao left China at age 22 to study civil engineering in Japan and the U.S. but returned as a visiting professor at Hunan University in 2002. On a trip to the region’s vast bamboo forests, the memory of those kites gave the 47-year-old Xiao a flash of inspiration: Bamboo was strong enough for kites, but he suspected that it could be fortified to make even sturdier things, like bridges and houses.

Xiao, now an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, scoured textbooks and the Internet, hoping to find historical precedent for structural bamboo. His research had urgency. Most of China has been stripped of timber-worthy trees, so rural buildings are often made of shoddy concrete, which is exactly what led to the catastrophic school collapses during the earthquakes in Sichuan province in May. What Xiao found wasn’t terribly useful: a wealth of arty one-off projects, but nothing a contractor could ever build with.

Bamboo is a remarkable material. Some species have stalks as dense as hardwood. It’s the world’s fastest-growing woody plant, and it’s an exceptionally good absorber of carbon. But its irregular, knotty form is a problem. Making a reliable bamboo structure used to mean picking through stalks to find the ones that met precise measurements. Timber, on the other hand, can be cut to standard sizes. So Xiao set about developing a process to transform bamboo strips into easy-to-manage beams. In 2006 he devised GluBam, bamboo timber sturdy enough for beams and trusses. Last winter, he returned to China and, using just an eight-man crew and no machinery, built a 33-foot GluBam bridge capable of supporting eight tons in the remote, ramshackle Hunan province town of Leiyang. The feat was so surprising, it was covered on China’s national news.

Bamboo Beam

Since then, Xiao has been busy building GluBam houses and classrooms in parts of Sichuan leveled by earthquakes. But he hopes that GluBam’s most positive effect might be an overhaul of the bamboo industry itself. China produces up to a third of the world’s bamboo—Hunan a quarter of that output—but much of it goes to low-value, barely profitable uses, such as concrete molds and chopsticks. GluBam could spark a dynamic industry in China and provide a sustainable replacement for current forestry operations worldwide. “That was the intent all along,” Xiao says. “This could open a vast market. It could create a whole new source of money and jobs.”

The bridge Yan Xiao built in Leiyang with GluBam was the town’s first. Each beam that spans the brick columns was created using Xiao’s novel process of transforming irregular bamboo into a practical building material. First he tore strips of bamboo from the stalk and arranged them in such a way as to provide the most strength. He then coated the strips with glue and compressed them in a self-built hydraulic press into beams, 33 feet long and up to three feet wide, each capable of supporting eight tons. Xiao says that the beams cost just 20 percent as much as imported lumber. Better still, rural China has a constantly replenishing supply of bamboo.

The Exotic Wind Farmers

Bahrain 1

Not wanting to be left behind by Saudi Arabia and Dubai, the country of Bahrain has been approving some interesting and eye-popping developments in the realm of green architecture. Especially interesting is the new Bahrain World Trade Center located in the city of Manama. The 50-story complex contains two identical towers that rise over 240 meters in height.

The sail-shaped buildings offer a visually striking silhouette, appropriately referencing the maritime environment of this small Middle Eastern island, and boast one very unique feature — 3 giant wind turbines tying the two “sails” together.

Bahrein 3

The first skyscraper to integrate large-scale wind turbines suspends three 1,200-megawatt units between its matching 787-foot office towers. The turbines, which were completed in April, supply 15 percent of the electricity for the two buildings—roughly the same amount used by 300 homes.

Bahrein 2

To maximize energy output, the tapered towers funnel wind between them, creating a negative pressure zone behind the buildings that draws more air through the gap. This suction effect increases wind speeds by up to 30 percent at each of the 95-foot-long rotors to boost electricity production. It also redirects wind gusts hitting the tower by up to 45 degrees off center so that they hit the turbines at a nearly perpendicular angle for optimal electricity generation

As these stories and pictures show, beauty and daring architecture do not mean something can’t be environmentally friendly. Is 10-15% of the energy use acceptable – maybe not. But it is the first attempt to use modern, alternative ways to produce energy directly integrated into the structure of a large building. As solar foil material will become more and more available and we no longer need to have rigid, silicon based panels, it should be possible to add energy generation on the skin of the buildings reaching much higher levels than the three wind turbines alone.

Axel Meierhoefer