Link to Student
Journal Entry For
Module 6 - Evaluate Your Alternatives
- Your original building form from module 5
- I decided to go with the building form that I created on module 5 as a baseline for this module.
- The recommended building form based on your evaluation and analysis
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Step 1
- Using the provided custom nodes provided in the examples ,with my own modifications, as a starting point, I decided to evaluate the building cost and the solar insolation potential of the building as my two important metrics. I also reported the surface area and total floor areas. I decided to leave out the volume in my excel report summary as I believe that it doesn’t impact decision making as much as a the floor area or surface area of the envelope. I also evaluated the cost and the insolation potential as cost and sustainability are usually a top priority for most clients and they are both parameters that can be easily evaluated given the building geometry alone.
- I used solarAnalysis, estimateCostPerFloorArea, massFloors to create another custom node called evaluatePairsOfInput that would take in all inputs needed for solar analysis, computing total building cost as well as reporting the surface area and floor area and give out the needed outputs. Below are screenshots to further elaborate this work flow.
- Overall work floor integrating the evaluatePairsOfInput custom node that outputs the needed report to a csv file
- EvaluatePairsOfInputs node integrated in workflow above. To be able to take in all inputs needed for the solar analysis, cost estimation as well as reporting Surface and floor areas.
- solarAnalysis custom node
- estimateCostByFloorArea custom noded used to estimate total cost
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Step 2
- Here is the summary table showing the gross floor areas, gross surface areas, total building costs and cumulative solar insolation potentials
- The first table below tested for building height range of 600 to 750 but I realized that we were far exceeded the allowable total floor area range of 1.2 - 1.5 million SF. I therefore to do a second simulation for the range of 450 - 600 for the building heights in order to stay within the allowable range - this is shown in table 2.
- Table 1
- Table 2 - Highlighting the top 3 recommendations - more details in the next step
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Step 3
- To rank the building alternatives, I considered the the buiding cost, and the solar insolation potential as the most important metrics. Since the floor area and the building height both proportionally affect the building cost, while the surface area also in some way affects the solar insolation potential, the three parameters were not directly included in the single objective optimization.
- I considered the solar insolation potential to be the most important metric of the remaining two and gave it a weight of 3. The upfront building cost was given a weight of 1.5. This is because the solar insolation potential will have impact on the longterm building operational costs and therefore as muvh as the upfront cost is important to the client, I would say that reducing the lifetime operating costs by having a chosing a building with a higher insolation potential would be a smarter choice. In general, we do want to maximize solar insolation potential while minimizing upfront costs
- I performed the optimization on excel as show below and highlighted the top 3 choices givem their high computed sum, with the top choice highlighted in green. These choices maximize the allowable floor area which is benefitial for the client at a cost that is not that much higher than the other options with smaller floor area.
- The top choice has a top height of 600 and a base rotation of 80 degrees. As compared to the other two recommended choices, the top choice has the lowest building cost but a higher insolation potential, even if its computed sum is lower than the other two.
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Step 4
- Using the input parameter values for “best” case I created the building form on revit and panelized the form using rect_panel with resizable opening adaptive component using th work flow shown below.
- I used most of the provided custom nodes like computeSunDirectness, PanelbySurface_U_V and the work flow shown in the example to create a visual of the best case mode. The visual feedback was provided by adjusting the opening sizes as well as coloring the panels based on the directness to the sun.
- The full workflow is as shown below and the images are the ones already provided at the beginning of this document
