Introduction

 

The name GROENE GEVELS literally means ‘green facades’ and situates itself in the growing need for more greenery in towns. From an aesthetic point of view as well as from a biodiversity point of view, modern cities nowadays follow a global trend of introducing more greenery into their landscape. Furthermore, more greenery has an important effect on the heat management in cities. Due to the tremendous amount of concrete, heat gets poorly dissipated and real ‘urban heat islands’ are created. The presence of more green, more specifically by introducing vertical green facades to houses and buildings, can compensate for this ‘heat island’ effect and can improve the air quality in cities by filtering microparticles, CO2 and other polluting agents from the air. 

 

 

Objectives

 

The GROENE GEVELS project aims to develop a new and cost efficient system to build green vertical facades based on innovative superabsorbing technical textiles, wherein the plants, the control system and the growth substrate are tuned to each other. 

 

ChemStream

 

The role of ChemStream within this project is to develop innovative hydrogels or superabsorbers that can be integrated into the technical textiles that make up the growth substrate for the plants. It is important that those hydrogels are not phytotoxic, not biodegradable and that they can retain the water and nutrients in order to slowly feed it to the plants. It is equally important that the hydrogel material is well bonded to the textiles, preferentially covalently bound, so that it cannot leach and disappear from the vertical green wall after time.

 

For this research, ChemStream can build further on the experience that was gained in the BLOCKDROP UV-curable hydrogel formulation development. More info

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With support from: