Water Conveyor
Use of geometry and digital fabrication to improve moisture buffering capability of architectural ceramic
Year
2018
My Role
Graduate Studies @Harvard GSD instr. Nathan King
Computational Design, Process Development, R&D Research
In collaboration with Caleb Marhoover
This project uses a design intervention within the realm of architectural ceramics as a vehicle to increase the potential for moisture management through building surfaces. The goal is to develop a tile whose geometry facilitates the preferential movement of moisture from one side to the other, building upon the natural moisture-buffering capabilities of low-fired ceramics.
The tiles borrow elements from bio-inspired surface topographies that encourage water condensation — which constitute the source side, where moisture is collected — as well as from the general principles of heat-sink design, which form the sink side, where moisture is released. Together, these create a tile body that preferentially moves moisture from source to sink.
These complex geometries were only realizable via ceramic 3D printing. The gyroidal sink design creates a large surface area for evaporation while remaining structurally stable through the drying and firing processes. The end product is a parametric tile system that can be retrofitted onto interior walls and ceilings.
Concept
The Ceramic Water Conveyor is a porous architectural tile engineered to give moisture a preferred direction of travel through a wall or ceiling. Where a conventional unfired-clay or low-fired ceramic surface buffers humidity passively — absorbing water vapor when ambient RH rises and releasing it back into the same room when RH drops — this tile is geometrically asymmetric, so the moisture it captures on one face is preferentially shed from the opposite face.
The tile body is divided into two functionally distinct sides:
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a source side, facing the building interior, tuned to capture water vapor;
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a sink side, facing an exterior buffer space, tuned to release it.
In application, this enables a moisture analogue of the Trombe Wall: arrays of tiles replace selected window apertures or entire ceilings, with the sink side enclosed by a semi-permeable glass cavity that admits sun and air but blocks weather, so the wall continuously wicks interior humidity outward.
Sink Side
Promote Evaporation
Ceramic
Glaze
Source Side
Promote Condensation
Custom GCode
The project used a delta-style printer fitted with an LDM WASP 2040 paste extruder, a custom Grasshopper slicer (single-perimeter spiral-vase toolpaths with feed-rate modulation for small features), and gantry-mounted DC fans for in-process drying stabilization. The integrated tiles were given their bumps by injecting periodic z-spikes into the toolpath every five layers — an aesthetic/functional feature that exists only because the surface is generated by motion rather than molded.
The gyroid — a triply periodic minimal surface — was hypothesized to be the most effective sink because its pore network is continuous in all three axes, so airflow and evaporation are not direction-locked the way they are in extruded fins. The hygroscopic experiments were inconclusive (1 g scale resolution, chamber leakage, uneven sample handling), but the fabrication results were unambiguous: the gyroid was by far the most dimensionally stable form through drying and firing, while the linear extrusion (F1) warped the most.
100 mm/sec
60 mm/sec
48 mm/sec
warping during drying
High stability with isotropic structure
gyroid
straight
villius
diamond
