User:Kfbrigham/sandbox

Scientist and artists have been studying solutions to contemporary challenges in building construction and industrial design that use living tissue instead of inanimate material. Examples include: self-mending biocement, self-replicating concrete replacement, and mycelium-based composites for construction and packaging. Artistic projects include building components and household items.

History
The field of living building materials (LBMs) began with biomimetic mineralization imitating corals. The use of microbiologically induced calcite precipitation (MICP), a form of biomineralization, in concrete was pioneered by Adolphe et al in 1990, as a method of applying a protective coating on building facades. In the 2000s, fungus mycelium-based building materials were introduced. Greensulate, a mushroom-based insulation was developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 2006/2007 academic year. During the late 2000s and 2010s, mycelium composites were developed as packing materials, acoustic absorbers, and structural building materials such as bricks.

In the United Kingdom, the Materials for Life (M4L) project was founded at Cardiff University in 2013 to "create a built environment and infrastructure which is a sustainable and resilient system comprising materials and structures that continually monitor, regulate, adapt and repair themselves without the need for external intervention." ML led to the UK's first self-healing concrete trials. In 2017, M4L was expanded into the Resilient Materials 4 Life (RM4L) consortium led by Cardiff University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Bath, and the University of Bradford and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. This consortium aims to build on the successes of M4L and "create smart materials that will adapt to their environment, develop immunity to harmful actions, self-diagnose deterioration and self-heal when damaged." RM4L has four research themes: self-healing of cracks at multiple scales, self-healing of time-dependent and cycling loading damage, self-diagnosis and immunization against physical damage, and self-diagnosis and healing of chemical damage.

In 2016, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched Engineered Living Materials (ELM) program. This goal of this program is to "develop design tools and methods that enable the engineering of structural features into cellular systems that function as living materials, thereby opening up a new design space for building technology. The program aims to validate these new methods through the production of living materials that can reproduce, self-organize, and self-heal." In 2017, Ecovative Design was awarded a $9.1 million contract funded by the ELM program to "(1) grow a living hybrid composite building material in the field using locally sourced feedstocks, (2) genetically re-program that living material with responsive functionality (wound repair, protective surfaces, and/or infection response, for example), and (3) rapidly reuse and redeploy material into new shapes, forms, and applications." In 2020, a research group at the University of Colorado funded by an ELM grant published a paper after successfully creating exponentially regenerating concrete.