Intended users
- Architects
- Sustainable Designers & Engineers
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
When architects are designing buildings, they may be confused about how to take sustainability into consideration. Doing life-cycle analysis (e.g., life-cycle cost analysis) can also be troublesome to them. Therefore, I will develop a tool so that the users can use it to automatically conduct sustainability analysis, only providing some basic building information. Engineering economics concepts should be taken into consideration.
The sustainability analysis will cover the following two points:
- Life Cycle Cost (in equivalent uniform annual cost, or EUAC, considering the time value of money and inflation)
- The proportion of self-generated electricity in operation costs
Inputs
- Building Geometry Information (base section, top section, top rotation, height, story height, levels)
- Design Usage Life (the higher the usage life, the construction material with better quality should be chosen, the higher the cost)
- Roof Solar Panel Cost Per Area (the higher the regeneration efficiency, the higher the cost)
- Relationship between shaded area on roof and height (as a function)
- Electricity Unit Price
- Interest Rate and Inflation Rate
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
- Create the building with the user input geometry, create different levels, get basic architectural information (floor area, surface area, total volume)
- Compute construction cost based on floor area, height, type of solar panel chosen, and design usage life
- Compute solar regeneration electricity equivalent dollars based on top section area and input shading-height function
- Compute annual operation and maintenance cost (maintenance cost based on height and floor area, operation cost based on solar regeneration, floor area and height)
- Compute demolish cost based on floor area and height
- Apply engineering economics with input interest rate to compute EUAC of life cycle cost of the building
- Use Generative Design to analyze multiple scenarios
Outputs
- EUAC of total life cycle cost
- The proportion of self-generated electricity in operation costs
- The whole generative design tool for users to do optimization