Tool Name: Instant Panelized Wall Generator
Teaser Image
Video Tutorial
Overview
The tool helps a contractor who wants to implement prefabricated panelized wall to their projects. The tool will be provided the manufacturers to set up constraints such as wall height and width, which is within their capability of producing. The contractor will then input the parameters and test what is the corresponding cost, weight, CO2 emissions and thermal resistance of the panelized wall. They can also use Dynamo to generate the potential best design.
Dynamo Code
Step 1: Set Inputs
There are 5 inputs the users will choose from, the wall height, width, thickness, middle extrusion %, and wall material. There are 3 self-defined materials, mass timber, concrete and insulated glass. Every time the user runs the program, a dropdown menu will pop up and ask the user to choose one material from it.
Step 2: Define the Geometry
The base shape is defined by 6 points which are two parallel arcs with a specified middle extrusion % with respect to the wall width. The two arcs then is connected as a surface, and then thickened as a solid.
Step3: Calculations
Calculations are combined in the custom node of each material. There are four values evaluated: total cost, total weight, total CO2 Emissions, and thermal resistance. The unit cost, density, unit CO2 emissions and R value are all searched online. All three materials used the same formula, but with different unit values.
Mass Timber Custom Node:
Step 4: Select Output
From last step, we can get 12 values, 4 outputs from each of the 3 materials. However, as the user chose only 1 material, we want to return only the correlated ones of the specified material.
Step 5: Outputs
There are 6 outputs in total. 4 are material specific and 2 are geometry based. 5 of them are to be minimized, which are total cost, total weight, CO2 emissions, thermal resistance, and surface area. 1 is to be maximized, which is the thermal resistance, as it can help with thermal efficiency and potentially leads to less energy consumption.
Result Analysis
Step 1: Set objectives and constraints
The thickness to width ratio is set between 0.05 and 0.2 for genal cases based on real world applications.
Step 2: Analysis Result
- Concrete
As we wanted to have a larger thermal resistance, lower cost and lower CO2 emissions, the selected case is a great choice to go. It has a high middle extrusion %. and a large width.
- Mass Timber
As the CO2 emission of mass timber is negative, we can be looser on this criteria. Thus, we chose a relatively middle cost and high thermal resistance. The wall is very high. It is good for aesthetics and for high structures. If the contractor weighs the CO2 emission heavily, mass timber is a great choice.
- Insulated Glass
To minimize the cost and CO2 emissions, we chose a relatively high thermal resistance. In real case, the wall thickness does not matter that much for insulated glass since it is either 2 layers or 3 layers. Thus, in the next step, the thickness of wall for insulated glass will be changed to number of layers of insulate glass, and the distance between each layer.