Startup ST Bungalow LLC (Garrison, N.Y., U.S.) and Molinelli Architects (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., U.S.), in collaboration with the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Alliance for Research Technology (SM2ART) — a partnership between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Tenn., U.S.) and the University of Maine (Oreno, U.S.) — have been awarded an Industrial Collaboration grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technology Office, for R&D of a patented “ConTech” stay-in-place (SIP) composites formwork system that can be made from recycled materials such as wind turbine blades.

Phase one of the grant, involving computer modeling, was recently completed and now, a phase two grant for a larger sum has been awarded for physical prototypes, scaling up and certification.

Formwork is “a temporary structure used in construction to contain and shape freshly poured concrete until it hardens and becomes self-supporting.” The ConTech building construction system is designed for reinforcement of concrete flatwork such as floors and roofs as well as infrastructure such as bridge decking. Partners note that the nonferrous (no steel) patent has many advantages over steel rebar and steel decking as well as fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) rebar. These include significant savings due to the stay-in-place formwork feature which reduces time and labor, the cost of steel, labor involved in placing rebar and use of recycled materials such as recycled wind blade or boating composites which typically come cheap. ST Bungalow adds that the patent enables concrete to do what it does best — compression.

Moreover, the formwork system has an additional appeal to contractors and architects looking to meet increasingly strict standards and solutions. Its nonferrous aspect avoids problems associated with steel rebar such as corrosion and expansion due to increasingly adverse climate conditions such as heat and increased moisture. Wind blade recycling is a bottleneck in the wind industry and this formwork system has the potential to provide an end purpose solution that consumes enough FRP blade material to actually drive circularity in the wind industry, as well as boating.

ST Bungalow LLC and Molinelli Architects began a joint venture in 2013 and since then have been developing the Contech”formwork construction system, including filing patent applications which have been issued and are pending. The latest patent filing is pending in the U.S. Patent Office: US20240084590A1.