Building a skyscraper requires a lot of energy, but a new technique developed by a Massachusetts engineering firm could provide the necessary energy savings, and the construction cost, in the process.
Dubbed a “energy-efficient construction,” the technique involves building a building with a thin, flexible sheet of flexible plastic that can be cut with a drill bit, then bent to fit inside a container and placed in the proper position for the desired height.
The material is designed to absorb heat, and is a lightweight, low-cost way to cut through concrete without adding any weight to the building, said the paper’s author, Kevin Janssen of Boston-based Jansens Engineering.
Building skyscrapers with such a flexible sheet can be done much more efficiently than building them with concrete, said Janssens, who was not involved in the study.
The flexible plastic sheet can also be used for exterior walls, as well as for the exterior of the building itself.
The process is called “building the right way.”
Janssensen is a member of the Institute of Building Science at Harvard University.
His research group has developed a new material for building flexible sheet materials.
This type of flexible material, known as a “stretchable sheet,” can be fabricated by laying a sheet of a flexible polymer (such as polyethylene) on a hard surface, such as concrete.
The polymer layer is then heated to tensile strength to shape the flexible sheet.
The flexibility of the sheet is then used to form a flat, rectangular shape that can then be cut to shape.
A flexible sheet has a thickness of up to 10 nanometers, the thickness of a human hair.
It can be made up of a single layer of polymer or several layers stacked on top of each other.
The flexible plastic sheets, which can be used in a variety of applications, are often used to construct the inside of skyscrapes.
However, they have not been widely used in buildings.
The new paper, published in the journal Nature Materials, says this flexibility is ideal for a variety the types of construction projects that require a building’s interior to be insulated from the outside.
The paper describes a new, energy-efficient way to build flexible sheet structures that use the flexibility to build a large structure, such a skyscraper, with the strength of a conventional concrete wall.
Using flexible sheets, Janses group could reduce the cost of building skyscrapings by at least 50 percent, the researchers said.
They added that the new method can be adapted to any building type.
For example, in an office building, a flexible material can be designed to form two parallel columns, each 10 to 12 feet wide and three to five feet high.
A flat sheet of plastic can be formed on top to form the base of the columns.
The columns can be folded into a rectangle, then folded back to form another rectangular section, each of which can have up to 30 feet of the base exposed.
The flat section can then extend through the center of the tower to form an outer shell.
A thin, thin layer of plastic is then layered atop this outer shell to form columns, and this structure can be stacked on the outer layer of the structure to form what is called a “tower.”
This design can be repeated many times, as needed, depending on the height of the skyscraper, the research team said.
It is also possible to make a building using a similar approach for buildings with a high roof, as is the case for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Singapore.
Janssen said the new approach has a lot in common with the technique used by the Japanese firm of Katsuya Nakamura, who developed the “bamboo construction” system for skyscraping.
Using bamboo, a material that is usually only a thin layer over a hard, flexible surface, the Japanese company designed skyscrapable, highly flexible structures.
The new flexible plastic material, he said, has similar properties to bamboo.