Digital Stone Construction

Dimensioned stone is a durable, low-maintenance material with high thermal mass, low embodied carbon and minimal embodied energy Hammond & Jones, 2008. But is perceived as expensive to quarry, cut and transport.
Among the contributing factors to this high cost is the high volume of waste during quarrying, due to the natural variability and irregularity of blocks resulting from imperfections and the constraints of joints in the bed rock. This irregularity is extremely challenging to design with, and also hinders the use of reclaimed stone, a key measure for further reducing the environmental impact of the material BRE, 2003.
It is speculated that recent advances in digital technology, automation and robotics could be utilised to overcome these challenges, to streamline the design and fabrication of stone, and to reduce costs. One approach to enhancing digital design and robotic manufacturing could be through scanning and algorithmic positioning of materials, as has been demonstrated with timber products.
The application of similar techniques and workflows are proposed to investigate the use of waste and/or reused stone for structural design. The project will specifically seek to:
1.verify the capability of 3D scanning techniques to adequately capture the geometry of irregular stones;
2.investigate the feasibility of using packing algorithms to digitally assemble irregular stones into larger structural geometries;
3.investigate the optimal packing and arrangements of irregular stones with regards to strength/performance of the larger structural geometry.
Positioning
Digital design and fabrication workflows of variable materials
A number of recent research projects have investigated the use of natural or variable materials in digital design and fabrication workflows, such as the arrangement and positioning of irregular wood components through algorithmic techniques Monier et al., 2013. Further studies show the possibility to physically scan and data process natural wood branches and connect them by organizing the forms obtained within the dataset Schindler et al., 2014. Similarly, the "Mine the scrap" project investigated the use of scrap material by scanning leftover wood plates of random geometry and arranging them algorithmically to match a given design envelope. An overview of the above-mentioned workflows was considered by Eversmann 2018 in order to produce a double storey timber structure with hand split wood plates of varying dimensions.
All of the above studies have focused on timber products. The applicability to stone appears unexplored and will be the focus of this project.
Stone masonry construction and analysis
Masonry construction using irregularly packed and shaped units is termed "rubble" masonry and is uncommon in modern construction. Most analysis of rubble stone structures is in the context of existing structures and concerns strengthening or stability assessment. Subsequently, the optimal arrangement of irregular sized and shaped stones needs investigating as part of this project. Discrete Element Methods DEM have been shown to excellently capture the behaviour of masonry structure Pulatsu et al., 2016.