Smart Bricks Offer Transformative Power and Interact With Buildings.
The University of West England (UWE Bristol) is developing what they’re calling ‘smart bricks,’ which are to be used in the European ‘Living Architecture’ program (LIAR) led by Newcastle University in efforts to create new sustainable measures for living. These living bricks will be able to, quite literally, bring buildings alive with their ability to generate electricity from the sun, clean wastewater, and modify the air within structures.
Created from bio-reactors with algae and microbial fuel cells, UWE explains that these elements allow for smart bricks to “self-adapt” based on the changing environment around them such as the weather outside, the number of occupants in the building and so on. The cells within the bricks were selected based on their abilities to make buildings sustainable: the “micro-organisms [were] specifically chosen to clean water, reclaim phosphate, generate electricity and facilitate the production of new detergents.”
Amazingly, wherever these bricks are used (whether it’s interior or exterior), they can contain millions of living organisms that can sense and react to what is around them. LIAR Project Director at UWE, Professor Andrew Adamatzky, said, “Each smart brick is an electrical analogous computer. A building made of such bricks will be a massive-parallel computing processor.” In other words, these bricks are truly smart, and have the capability to transform how we live in buildings and how they live with us.
Smart bricks will be part of the €3.2m project, LIAR, and research will continue to move forward to perfect the material. The UWE team has not explained the cost behind what it takes to make the bricks, nor the time it takes to make them, or if they plan to, in the future, introduce them into the commercial market. As for now, smart bricks remain part of a project initiative.
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