| Plastic Lab |
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The North-Pacific Gyre is a system of ocean currents which traps an ever-increasing abundance (millions of tonnes) of discarded plastic. The brief is to build a scientific research facility on an island in the vicinity of the Gyre, where techniques to harvest the Gyre plastic are investigated. The basis for the proposed laboratory structure is a three-dimensional Penrose tiling system, where the building blocks are the four three-dimensional Penrose tile forms.
The ideal manufacturing process to create each hollow tile is blow molding, where plastic is melted into a resin and then expanded into the mould using compressed air. The proposal is to build the laboratory in a piecemeal fashion, where the first sections to be built are basic shelter, and plastic separation and blow-molding facilities. Additional sections can be added as more plastic is harvested from the Gyre. Eventually the lab can export tiles for use as building blocks for emergency housing and other temporary facilities. The problem is that over 90% of the Gyre plastic fragments are smaller than 5 millimetres, which makes separation into different classes or colours difficult. Polypropylene (PP), which mainly occurs in the form of fishing line, typically occurs in larger fragments, and can be separated from the other Gyre plastics via a sifting process. The other plastics can be sequentially separated from the undifferentiated mass using liquids of varying density that are readily available at a remote outpost (sea water, rain water, coconut oil, alcohol and petrol), into heavier fragments (PETE and HDPE), and lighter foams and films (PS). Each of the four tile forms is manufactured with a different mix of the separated Gyre plastics, to give a unique texture and colour to each tile type. The less dense plastics are also more likely to be transparent (50% of Gyre plastic is transparent). In this way, one of the four tile forms can be dedicated to a translucent plastic mix with embedded lighting, which filter sunlight during the day and act as light boxes at night. The complexity of the tiling system renders traditional construction from drawings near impossible. Instead, scale models of building ‘chunks’ are used as a building guide, and the fragments are then assembled at the final building stage. Due to the lightness of the tiles, a whole roof component can be constructed on the ground and lifted into place. The system of interconnecting tiles can also channel and store rain water. In this way, an entire wall can be a rain water storage system. |
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Material Technologies | Master of Architecture | University of Technology Sydney | Autumn 2009 | Instructors: John de Manincor and David Welsh
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