Materials of the Future

Recent attempts to make building home’s faster, more cost effective, and friendlier to the environment, have mostly been characterised by builders and architects going back to basics; using cheap and renewable materials to get the same affect that man-made products which produce a lot of pollution give. There is, however, a lot of advancements occurring all of the time, which could go some way towards resolving these three issues too.

The development of new building materials is happening all of the time, and if you’ve yet to hear about them that is only because the knowledge of them has yet to percolate through.

One of the most effective ways to get more cost effective and environmentally friendlier materials for buildings is to extent the lifespan of the materials. Self healing concrete seeks to do just that: This is a reinvention of an old classic (concrete), where bacteria spores are added to the mixture which can fill in cracks caused by age and exposure.

Nanotechnology presents a wide array of interesting new options for building materials. Because they can be programmed to conform to a variety of shapes, their tensile strength is far above any other building material. This is likely to be the highest growth area for building material production in this century.