Biologist Scott Turner has learned the secret of the termite mound for maintaining a comfortable internal climate for its inhabitants.
His research has the potential to the transform the entire construction industry as engineer Rupert Soar aligns those findings with his own cutting-edge work in radically new forms of building and building materials.
Testing of a system which combines these innovations is slated for the summer of 2010.
Turner, who is a professor at the State University of New York in Syracuse, says he believes the new system will extend the capability of wind power to a much broader range of buildings.
“The common way of exploiting wind is to either turn it into electricity with a windmill, or building a tall structure, where you can take advantage of high winds off the ground,” Turner tells Axiom News in a telephone interview from South Africa where he is studying termite behaviour.
“What the termites do is they build a structure that exploits a kind of wind energy, mainly turbulent wind energy, that wind engineers have tended to regard as a nuisance kind of wind energy.
“But termites have learned how to harness it with these structures to make it do useful work for them.”
Termite mounds are replete with a complex maze of tunnels which tap and manage and make use of the gusts of wind that strike them.
Turner likens them to operating like a radio tunes in radio wave signals.
“Instead of using radio wave signals, they’re using frequencies of wind . . . and having a tuning effect on that chaotic energy source,” he says.
“When they do that and connect (the wind) in the right way to the (termite) nest underground, it provides them with a really impressive degree of climate control.”
Soar’s objective is to recreate the structure of the termite mounds so that houses and apartment complexes and office buildings can make use of turbulent wind energy in a similar way, and maintain comfortable internal environments with less or possibly even no reliance on technology — like air conditioning — powered by non-renewable energy sources.
The main focus of his work is finding a way to create wall panels that act more like membranes than barriers, incorporating these termite mound-like tunnels so that the walls adjust internal temperature and humidity by filtering and managing external wind.
Turner says the prospective system would likely be very low-cost, making it applicable to a wide range of scenarios, including economically disadvantaged communities.
While the reason he gets up in the morning is to study termites and learning how their mounds maintain a perfect climate has been a satisfying achievement for him, Turner adds that knowing his research is contributing to creating a better world is also rewarding.
“(The fact) that (this research) has also opened the door to the prospect of some potentially very useful product is kind of the icing on the cake for me,” he says.
To learn more about Soar and Turner’s initiative, visit this link.
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