Dave Koomen
3oct08
Some clarification so as to try to avoid misunderstandings of the feedback you received after the presentation:
- the list of tasks you’ve posted here for your further work needs to be focused on your design research goals. If you are still interested in providing daylighting via lightpipes for a set of underground spaces – rather than in designing lightpipes – then it’s probably better to first use the type of pipes and the type of space geometry accommodated by the software you’re using, and only after that consider whether the software’s limitations are seriously impacting the quality of your design.
Instead of movable lightpipes, you can consider heliostats for catching light from different directions and multiple pipes over different parts of each space with adjustable lids or louvers for accommodating varying outdoor light intensity (due to changes in weather, time of day and day of year), lenses and/or reflectors for redirecting light within the spaces, and so on. These technical devices don’t need to be modeled in detail at this stage, however, since changing the intensity of available light entering into each pipe can simulate their effects reasonably well (assuming this can be varied individually in the software) except for redistribution of light inside the spaces.
So rather than getting bogged down in trying to study all of these factors in detail, it seems better to consider the relationship between what you’re learning about lightpipes and what you’re aiming to accomplish architecturally.
Marco Visser
3oct08
With reference to the discussion after your presentation, the aim in terms of modeling structural behavior is not to sum moments from adjacent spans but to use the equations for continuous spans rather than individual, simply supported ones (still assuming for the time being that the beam section is constant.) Another direction, also discussed there briefly, is to account for varying crossection not only as it affects load distribution and torsion, but also in the resistance to those loads, which would allow using more of the bridge material as active structure, rather than just building a spine and cladding it.
These two directions can also be combined, but in any case there is still not much feedback to the overall design – aside from the crossection depth being driven by the beam depth – since there are no limitations set. Therefore, rather than trying to further refine the behavior of structural modeling, it would be good at this stage for you to pose some research question(s) which you can address through the model you’ve built, and then decide whether more detailed behavior modeling is needed to get the answers.
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Bart van den Broek
3oct08
Whichever way you eventually resolve the scaling problems that you mentioned during the presentation in relation to the software you’re using to model windflow, and even if you are able to test some physical models in an actual, not virtual, wind tunnel, it is very important that you consider more than one wind direction for shapes whose plan form is not radially symmetrical, since you would get misleading results concerning wind effects and performance except in the very unlikely case that the building site has only one strong wind direction.
Also, rather than attempting such an exhaustive survey of shapes, it would be best to prioritize, for example by trying three or four which differ from each other significantly and then exploring further in the directions which look promising.
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Arjan Klem
3oct08
It seems that your research is motivated at heart by a search for interesting (-looking) forms underpinned by some sort of non-standard structural logic – which is a valid pursuit as long as engineering considerations are not strongly prioritized. It’s important therefore to take into account what you’ve discovered in your experiments so far: that regular, symmetrical loadings on homogeneous materials result in regular, symmetric structural patterns.
Observing this, you can now consider what sources of irregularity, asymmetry and heterogeneity may be applicable to your design work, especially architectural ones such as program, or others based on environmental performance, for example. (Structural motivations alone won’t lead you in this direction, since strictly speaking – in the absence of other requirements – the best structural solution is for all activities to take palce on firm ground.)
Also, in order to not get bogged down in running long, highly detailed simulations, you need to find ways to simplify the models as far as possible while still capturing the relevant factors in the variations you test.
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Mark Min
3oct08
The direction your research is taking is interesting and contrasts strongly with most of your classmates’ work, in the sense that most of them are pursuing topics which are largely geometric in nature. This presents a challenge in terms of the structure and aims of this course, however, since you have not yet been able to construct any experimental framework within which to test aspects of your proposal, nor compare it to other possible proposals.
Since the geometric modeling tools (Generative Components, Maya, Rhino, etc.) which the others are using don’t suit this problem, I’d recommend you try something like NetLogo, whose agent-based structure allows simple but useful modeling of fluid and molecular behavior. You can download the current version from the internet and look through the example models included with the program. It would be also good if you could begin modeling yourself – at least by working through the tutorials – within the next few days.
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