Link to Design Journal
Journal Entry For
Module 7 - Study Your Options
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Step 1 - Generative Design Framework
The previous firm I worked for is involved in many industrial plotting projects, that motivates me to apply optimization for plotting work as shown below.
- Design Decision 1 Town planning - Plotting residential/industrial area on an empty piece of land
- Design Variables
- Plot size (for target plot)
- Shape of plot
- Road width
- Evaluators
- Salable (plotted) area - more is better
- Road connectivity with the plot - measure the length of road connected with the plot - more is better
- Cost of development (inc. utility, roads, and plots) - less is better
- Tradeoffs to Consider
- As plot size increases we can accommodate more salable area but we can potentially lose more road connectivity as it depends on the perimeter of the plot. Increasing plot size reduces area/perimeter ratio usually. Unnecessarily big plots will not be sold easily. So, reducing plot size increases the construction cost of utility and roads per plot area.
- Design Decision 2 Creating a tower form which maximizes solar insolation, minimizes construction cost and minimizes the cost of insolation.
- Design Variables
- Ht. of tower
- Angle of twist at top
- Base radius
- Evaluators
- Solar insolation potential
- Cost/insolation potential
- Material cost
- Most Important Tradeoffs to Consider
- We want our building to have maximum solar insolation, which brings natural light to the building. If we think sustainability point of view, the building might require more energy to maintain the temperature of the building.
- Also, as the solar potential of the building increases, the surface area of the façade also increases. which adds to the cost of the building.
- Design Decision 3 Structural optimization of truss
- Design Variables
- Member size (area)
- Shape of member
- Structural geometry
- Evaluators
- Total usage of material (cost)
- max deflection
- Redundancy in the structure
- Most Important Tradeoffs to Consider
- As we try to restrict the deflection of the structure our member sizes increases, so, the total cost also increases.
- In order to have more redundancy in the structure, we need to add more members which eventually increases cost. (Redundancy in the structure plays important role in the failure pattern of the structure.)
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Step 2 - Generative Design Study
- I have chosen to do the generative design study with Design Decision 2, Creating a tower form that maximizes solar insolation, minimizes construction cost and minimizes the cost of insolation.
- I have chosen to use the same tower form which I have used in the last two assignments. I want to check whether single objective optimization I performed in the last assignment is consistent with the result of the generative design tool or not.
- Inputs are as below. i. variables, ii. Fixed iii. for solar potential
Creating the Geometry of the tower form in the Dynamo.
Lofting the surface, Identifying roof, wall and ground surfaces.
Creating floor masses and calculating solar potential.
Calculating important properties for output.
Output
Generative design study looks as shown below.
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Step 3 - Generative Design Study Results
- Results:
The selected tower form is shown above.
- Here in the generative design tool, Tower ht., base, radius, and angle of twist are the variables. Here, I am trying to maximize the solar potential and minimize Material cost and cost per insolation.
- The selected tower form is marked in the plots, in the plot cost/insolation to Solar insolation. The selected tower form seems to give best values less cost and more solar insolation. Also, the circle radius in the same plot shows the material cost, it seems that selected tower form offers the most value.
- It is quite obvious that as tower height increases, wall surface area increases and hence solar potential increases which also increases the cost. It is almost linear relation as shown in the plot. However, our selected tower form falls below the linear trend which offers more solar insolation for an overall low cost.
- Here the optimized tower form is consistent with the results of the last module. As it is quite obvious that the angle of the twist in the building adds extra facade are which increases solar potential, but it’s not worth it. Here the chosen option has 1 degree of angle of twist at the top which is consistent with the zero in the last homework. Tower height here is also close to the results of the last module. (Base radius was not a variable in the last module, but was close to 120 m)
- Here as discussed in step - 1, as we are maximizing solar potential of the building we might be increasing the energy demand of the building to keep it cool. But we can find ways with the modern construction method by using insulation to tackle this issue.