Teaser:
Above is the teaser image for what results from using my tool could look like. Think about each panel as a solar panel and for this structure to be placed at the top of a building.
Overview:
Hello Users! You’ve come across PetalCanopy - a modeling tool to help you design a solar canopy for your very own building. A solar canopy may seem like a wasteful and overly complex version of your ordinary solar panel array, but this tool is here to illustrate that it’s better than you might think. Picture every time a panel gets damaged, dirty, or otherwise obscured and you or a service team are required to go and inspect, repair, change, or clean the array. Something as little as dust or rain might affect your energy production significantly. Now, play around a little with PetalCanopy and discover how a kinetic solar canopy is able to open and close to your liking, preventing these troublesome issues with ease.
While it might look intimidating to work with, PetalCanopy is simplified to a set of 3 inputs that you can play around with: number of petals, petal angle, and inner radius. As for the outputs, don’t worry about those too much, the main feature is the 3D rendering of your canopy. However, if you are curious, the two primary outputs are a list of panels displayed on each leaf surface and a list of the surfaces (or leaves) that make up the model. Each panel on the leaf surface represents a solar panel that would function just like an ordinary panel - taking in solar energy and yielding electricity.
Side note: For those are curious, this project was inspired by my love for bio-inspired designs (especially applicable in architecture) as well as by my senior capstone design project. A teammate and I designed and constructed a mechanical flower device (with the help of some online open source designs) made for long distance communication. Attached is a video of the flower in motion:
Dynamo:
Below is the general dynamo logic I used for assembling my tool:
First, a leaf shape is created by a set of 4 lines, each defined by a set of 3 points. After constructing one petal, I used Geometry.Rotate to create the various potential angled outputs of the leaf. The angle is set to a number slider so that the user can input a desired angle and the leaf will rotate accordingly. With a single leaf moving how I wanted, I then used Geometry.Rotate again to create a series of leaves along an inner circle centered at the origin. Once I had one layer done, I used Geometry.Translate and Geometry.scale to create a second, smaller layer mimicking the petal pattern of a real flower. Finally, with all leaf configurations made I used a familiar panelQuad logic to panelize each leaf.
Simplified Example of the two layer leaf array (un-panelized for simplicity)
Sample image Top View for what a 3 leaf canopy would look like fully closed.