Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from constructing and maintaining bridges and similar constructions
Captivated by the majestic Golden Gate Bridge as a young kid in San Francisco, structural engineer Zane Schemmer, a fellow at the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), hasn't lost his passion for bridges. Montaged between architecture and engineering before heading to college, the allure of the intricacies of structural engineering won him over. Now, blending design into algorithms, he ensures structures' strength, minimizes their carbon footprint, and keeps them manufacturable.
Currently, Schemmer, working alongside Josephine V. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, focuses on reducing a structure’s embodied carbon during construction. The embodied carbon, including emissions from materials extraction, production, transport, use, and demolition, hasn't been optimally addressed, and existing designs often have impractical complexities.
At the IASS 2024 symposium in Zurich, Schemmer and Carstensen presented their work on Discrete Topology Optimization algorithms, which can cut a bridge's embodied carbon by up to 20 percent. They achieve this by considering not only a material's performance and appearance but also its ease of procurement, proximity to the building site, and manufacturing and transport emissions.
Schemmer emphasizes the novelty of their algorithm's ability to consider multiple materials within a highly constrained solution space, generating manufacturable designs with a specified force flow. Real-life problems are seldom simple; traditional formulations struggle with lengthy, complex constraints. The goal is to incorporate these constraints, making it easier to translate designs from the computer into reality.
Taking a steel tower as an example, Schemmer explains how an efficient, lightweight design can be achieved, but steel is carbon-intensive to manufacture and transport. The topology optimization, he says, can replace some steel with timber elements or reduce steel in other sections to create a hybrid structure. This hybrid structure will function effectively while minimizing the carbon footprint.
Schemmer earned his BS and MS in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, where he focused on seismic design. He credits this education for providing a robust, traditional engineering background and knowledge of structural engineering's traditions and methods. However, at MIT, Schemmer values the opportunity to resist societal conventions and consider ideally unconventional ways of approaching problems, helping bridge the gap between perfect concepts and practical solutions.
From a carbon footprint perspective, Schemmer's optimization algorithms help create structures that outperform standard ones, using fewer materials yet still adhering to design requirements, passing codes, and meeting safety standards. This work will expose him to innovative ideas from other fields and likely lead to incorporating some of these insights into his engineering knowledge for designing greener ways of building bridges and other structures as he continues his doctoral work at MIT.
- Zane Schemmer, a fellow at the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), focuses on reducing a structure’s embodied carbon during construction.
- The Discrete Topology Optimization algorithms developed by Schemmer and Carstensen can cut a bridge's embodied carbon by up to 20 percent.
- These algorithms consider not only a material's performance and appearance but also its ease of procurement, proximity to the building site, and manufacturing and transport emissions.
- Schemmer and his colleague, Josephine V. Carstensen, presented their work at the IASS 2024 symposium in Zurich.
- Real-life problems are seldom simple, and traditional formulations struggle with lengthy, complex constraints. Schemmer's algorithm addresses this issue by generating manufacturable designs within a highly constrained solution space.
- Schemmer's optimization algorithms help create structures that outperform standard ones, using fewer materials yet still adhering to design requirements, passing codes, and meeting safety standards.
- As Schemmer continues his doctoral work at MIT, he will likely incorporate innovative ideas from other fields into his engineering knowledge, enabling him to design greener ways of building bridges and other structures that consider both the environment and mental science of climate-change.
