English Unraveling Concrete Bioreceptivity: Understanding biofilm formation and ways to enhance concrete bioreceptivity for green facade applications.
Source: BAM
Climate change and urbanization are presenting new challenges for urban planning and the construction industry. Sustainable and green cities result from close interplay of modern urban planning with integrated green spaces and the development and implementation of suitable building materials. Green façades as vertical green spaces are a key element of sustainable urban development. Green façades not only contribute to increasing local biodiversity, but also stabilize the ecosystem. They counteract the heat island effect in cities and improve the well-being of the residents. Microbially greened façades are particularly interesting as a low-maintenance alternative to conventional, macroscopic systems. Phototrophic organisms grow directly on the surface and form a green biofilm. This extreme habitat offers perfectly adapted organisms a space to develop and can result in a particularly stable and therefore low-maintenance green façade. The ability of a substrate to enable microbial growth is called bioreceptivity. But what exactly characterizes a bioreceptive substrate and how do biofilm and substrate interact? How can concrete, as the world's most widely used building material, be adapted for this purpose? How and why does spontaneous colonization and the formation of biofilms occur? How can biofilms be established in the laboratory? How can the bioreceptivity of concrete be quantified? These questions remain largely unanswered in the current technical literature and the lack of standards makes the development of bioreceptive building materials challenging. The departments Safety and Structues and Materials and the Environment of BAM are jointly researching the fundamentals of the bioreceptivity of concrete. Starting point is the publication presented here, which for the first time provides a comprehensive overview of this interdisciplinary topic. In order to accelerate further research, basic principles from various disciplines are presented and their interaction in the context of bioreceptivity is explained. Building on this, BAM investigates the fundamentals of the bioreceptivity of concrete experimentally and a green algae façade made of bioreceptive concrete is being developed using a model biofilm developed for this purpose for testing.
Bioreceptivity of concrete: A review
Leonie Stohl, Tanja Manninger, Julia von Werder, F. Dehn, Anna Gorbushina, Birgit Meng
published in: Journal of Building Engineering, 2023, volume 76, essay number 107201, pages 1 - 17.
BAM Department Safety of Structures
BAM Department Materials Engineering