Researchers at Penn State are undertaking a study into whether fungal materials can replace traditional acoustic insulation funded by the 2022 AIA Upjohn Research Initiative. The team behind the effort, funded in 2021 by both an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative grant and a SOM Foundation Research Prize, is being led by assistant architecture professor Benay Gürsoy from Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture Stuckeman School - Department of Architecture.

The project is titled Fungal Biomaterials for Sustainable Architectural Acoustics and builds on Gürsoy and her team's work at Penn State’s Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab, whose specialty involves fabricating biodegradable building components using mycelium. The new research path will focus specifically on the acoustic absorption properties of mycelium, with the goal of designing and building acoustic panel prototypes to be tested in the built environment.

“Mycelium-based composites are renewable and biodegradable biomaterials that result when mycelium, the vegetative root of fungi, is grown on agricultural plant-based residues,” Gürsoy said about the research. “These novel biomaterials have the potential to replace conventional petrochemical building materials without relying on the extraction of non-renewable resources. In our research at ForMat Lab, we explore sustainable ways of cultivating mycelium-based building parts and structures.”

ForMat Lab researchers who work in the research line are Ali Ghazvinian, an architecture doctoral candidate with whom Gürsoy initiated this research line, and Natalie Walter and Alale Mohseni, both architecture master’s degree students at Penn State. The team have been collaborating with John Pecchia, associate professor of plant pathology and director of the Mushroom Research Center at Penn State since 2018. 

As part of the research, the team is conducting mechanical tests to understand the physical endurance of biomaterials as acoustic panels, as well as using an impedance tube to understand their acoustic absorption performance. “This project combines fields of architecture, engineering, mycology and acoustics into one line of research,” said the project’s co-principal Natalie Walter. “With this approach, we can see different perspectives that we may have been unable to consider with just architectural backgrounds.”

The team believes that the replacement of traditional absorption panels with biomaterials can help play a major role in reducing embodied carbon emissions, as well as the amount of waste generated during material manufacturing.

News of the project comes months after a separate group of researchers from Penn State began research on embodied carbon in cities. Penn State was also one of a number of architecture schools that recently participated in an expo of biomaterial structures which populated the University of Virginia campus.

Other academic research breakthroughs recently seen in our editorial include a structural system at UCLA that becomes stronger by learning from its surroundings and a 3D printed lattice material from MIT that uses air pressure to warn about its own movement.