SUNIMPLANT project<\/a>, designed as a single-family dwelling, was created as an entrant in the recent \u201cSolar Decathlon\u201d organized by the United States Department of Energy and Morocco\u2019s Centre de recherche en Energie solaire et Energies nouvelles. The biannual international competition challenges teams of students to design and construct solar-powered buildings. The most recent edition was hosted in Ben Guerir, Morocco, the first time the competition has been held on the African continent.<\/p>\nAdvanced \u2018space ship\u2019
\n\u201cThis \u2018space-ship\u2019 is advanced in time and reflects a turn not only in North Africa but in hemp construction, which doesn\u2019t have comparable prototypes anywhere in the world,\u201d said Monika Br\u00fcmmer, a German architect and natural builder who led the project.<\/p>\n
While the building was designed as a stimulus for rural development, the technology also has application in urban settings, Br\u00fcmmer noted.<\/p>\n
Owner at Spain-based Cannabric, Br\u00fcmmer is also a co-founder of Adrar Nouh (2017), an NGO which promotes the use of indigenous hemp stalk for rural development and sustainable employment in Morocco\u2019s impoverished High Rif. Adrar Nouh was started in 2017 by Br\u00fcmmer and Abdellatif Adebibe, a Moroccan expert in alternative development in the Rif region.<\/p>\n
The challenge was to create a hemp composite using vegetable-based bio-resins, avoiding technical or synthetic components, Br\u00fcmmer said. The cylindrical envelope of the circular building, with minimal exposure of the 24 exterior panels, gives interior comfort through optimal damping and thermal phase shift, and osmosis of the components in the hempcrete formulation, Br\u00fcmmer said.<\/p>\n
Built for around $120,000, the building\u2019s price tag was less than half the cost of the most expensive buildings in the competition. Additional features of the 90 sq. m.<\/p>\n
SUNIMPLANT building include:<\/p>\n
A double skin fa\u00e7ade that employs a mixture of hemp, earth, pozzolan and lime, all sourced locally; and bio-composites incorporating hemp technical fibers that were produced via vacuum injection technology.<\/p>\n
A spherical, aerodynamic outer skin comprising 24 semi-flexible photovoltaic panels. Sponsored by DAS-Energy, the panels are exposed to all faces for their use of sun and light, with maximum 40% losses.<\/p>\n
Curved bio-composite panels made with hemp wool, which increase the performance of the photovoltaic panels by protecting their back side against the weather extremes of the semi-arid region of Ben Guerir, where temperatures reached 42\u00b0\u201346\u00b0C (107\u00b0\u2013 114\u00b0F) in the shade during the construction phase last August and September.<\/p>\n
International cooperation
\nBr\u00fcmmer said even greater performance could have been achieved if original plans to install hemp-clay boards for the internal partitions and floors, and other minor modifications, had not been abandoned due to funding constraints.<\/p>\n
Adrar Nouh contributed the architectural design, developed the hemp materials and cooperated in the construction of the building. Other participants on the SUNIMPLANT project were Morocco\u2019s National School of Architecture and National School of Applied Sciences, both based in Tetouan, Morocco, and Germany\u2019s Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A team of organizations has completed construction of a ground-breaking eco-building in Morocco that combines hemp construction with a high-tech solar energy system for total independence from the electrical grid. The SUNIMPLANT project, designed as a single-family dwelling, was created as an entrant in the recent \u201cSolar Decathlon\u201d organized by the United States Department of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[11286,12430,13594,11877],"supplier":[14879,11236],"class_list":["post-74080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-biocomposites","tag-buildingmaterial","tag-insulation","tag-naturalfibres","supplier-fraunhofer-center-fuer-silizium-photovoltaik-csp","supplier-u-s-department-of-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74080"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=74080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}