Characterisation of Pleurotus ostreatus and Ganoderma lucidum elephant skin inspired tiles for green buildings

• Main Author: Ng, Kuo Wei
• Other Authors: Hortense Le Ferrand
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Mycelium; Characterisation; Green buildings; Façade
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/174890
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Environmentally-friendly building materials are at the forefront of innovation with the prevalence of green buildings from the pressing climate issues. Mycelium-based composites (MBCs) have shown great potential as biodegradable and renewable façade panels for building applications, with thermal insulation properties. The most widely used fungal strains for mycelium-based composites are Pleurotus ostreatus (PO) and Ganoderma lucidum (GL). Combining MBCs with biomimicry principles, elephant skin morphology into textured façade tiles is efficient in building cooling. The paper aims to characterise and compare the effects of both PO and GL mycelium strains on bamboo fibre substrates in elephant skin inspired tile designs. Characterisation tests were deployed to characterise their mycelium network density, hydrophobicity characteristics, thermoregulation and cooling performance, environmental durability and prevalence in moisture absorbance. GL is the more hydrophobic mycelium strain and is resilient to environmental degradation. PO mycelium strain is found to be slightly better in limiting heat gain, and GL strain exhibits slightly better cooling performance. The results are not conclusive throughout to quantify a better-performing mycelium. The influence of the tile design has greater dominance on the thermoregulation performance. The researching findings hope to lay the research foundation for future characterisation studies on both strains, and imminently more mycelium strains to determine a favourable mycelium strain would help in improving the elephant skin inspired tile design performance of the green building by reducing energy reliance for conventional building cooling systems. Thus, the global warming crisis would be alleviated by the contributions of the mycelium-bamboo elephant skin inspired tiles as a green solution.