Green Building Unit 2.0. Construction system of phytoremediation for industrial and commercial zones in Colombia

Abstract

Air pollution is one of the main environmental problems in cities and industrial areas, among some of the sources we can mention the use of fossil fuels, emissions from industries and mining. In Colombia, air pollution prevention and control policies include tax incentives (Pedraza, 2015), which can be accessed through the use of sustainable buildings that demonstrate a positive impact, promoting the search for techniques or methods to control and measure air pollution.

This project promotes the development of new sustainable construction techniques to control air pollution through the implementation of a phytoremediation system, that is, through plants that allow purification to generate pleasant environments or environments for people. At the same time, the residue of the rice husk is used to improve the physical and mechanical properties of the construction units, complying with the construction regulations. The installation process of the constructive unit is made from a concrete block which part of the sand is replaced with rice husk ash and by modulating the blocks it forms a vertical garden.

The system works like the natural lungs of the planet, capable of absorbing, metabolizing or stabilizing the pollutants present in the air of the different living and commercial spaces.It also has hidden irrigation subsystems, it has cavities for planting the plants and it has with a monitoring subsystem through sensors for the maintenance and visualization of data in the cloud.

The project methodology consisted of 4 phases; Initially, a group of local plants capable of purifying the air were selected, then an irrigation system was developed that is hidden in the cavities of the Green Construction Unit, later a mixture is designed to improve the block by implementing the ash of the rice husk, and finally a monitoring subsystem was developed for the maintenance and supervision of the performance of each wall in the city.

The new Green Construction Unit is installed in the different environments of the city of Barranquilla, a total of 19.9 m2 of UCV 2.0 operating and fulfilling the main objective of cleaning 13,134 tons of harmful gases per year.

The monitoring system could be installed on the company's wall and is currently transmitting the data to the server of the web application that is already developed.