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Sustainable Modular Architectural System

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - S.M.A.S. (Sustainable Modular Architectural System)

Reporting period: 2016-03-01 to 2016-08-31

S.M.A.S. is the industrialisation and commercialisation fallout of PR.I.M.E3 - Procedures & Innovation for Modular buildings Energy-Efficient and Eco-friendly – a 3-year pre-industrialisation research project, co-funded by Italian Ministry of Environment (2012-2014). The S.M.A.S. framework includes varying combination of modules allowing for different architectural solutions by type and size. Main object of this proposal is to industrialise the whole process.
The development of the feasibility study was very important to understand the future of SMAS business, in line with the European dimension.
Within the 6-month development phase 1, the project partners agreed to proceed with the industrialization and commercialization of S.M.A.S system with the following actions: commercial agreements with important companies, IPR agreements, manifestation of interest for the realisation of a pilot projects, detailed costs for the production of one-storey and multi-storey demonstration prototype of the S.M.A.S. module.
S.M.A.S. project fits the sector of Sustainable Buildings with its highly innovative technological and energy-efficient systems, constituting a fundamental tool for the growth of SMEs, such as the Consortium partners, facing the chance of operate on international markets: S.M.A.S.industrialisation and promotion will be an important business opportunity for the Consortium due to its high ratio between quality and reduction of energy construction costs.
An analysis of the competitive environment - current and future scenarios – were carried out by identifying the markets in which the competitors operate. A state-of-the-art of the sustainable building and prefabrication sectors was carried out in order to assess the potential development of innovative technologies for improving energy efficiency.
The result is an efficient product that is available at a reasonable price to a large global market.
Analysing the state of art for aluminium structures, no competitors are present but in Japan, where a single-story house in aluminium was built in Tokyo in 2000 (started in 1997), designed by Toyo Ito & Associates. No multy-store aluminium building has never been worldwide exploited.
S.M.A.S. strength points are: the energy savings of all S.M.A.S. subsystems, high level of customization of buildings, prefabrication and competitive construction costs. Other innovative features are the greater speed and simplicity of structure realisation in place due to both the totally dry assemble of the various elements of modular building and the ability to pre-assemble it by prefabricated structures, makes the system particularly suitable in case of emergency related to natural disasters such as earthquakes or refugees migration.
S.M.A.S. building's modules - typological, functional and aesthetic flexibility