
The Airshell Prototype
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
Adaptive photovoltaic envelopes have the potential to improve building energy performance by controlling natural lighting and solar heat gains, while simultaneously generating electricity to match the building demand. This study analyses the potential of adaptive photovoltaic envelopes, from the design process to its evaluation.
This study by Prageeth Jayathissa, first presents a performative design environment that combines multiple technological branches into a single automated work-flow. The environment designs the form of the facade, provides feedback on its structural strength, analyses the energetic performance of the interior space, conducts a daylighting analysis, renders images and produces fabrication plans for a rapid design process.
Through this methodology, an adaptive photovoltaic envelope known as the Adaptive Solar Facade was successfully designed and constructed. The control strategy for the adaptive envelope is built using a model predictive control algorithm which runs successive simulations of the electricity production and building energy demand for all possible angle configurations of the panels.
Angle configurations that result in minimum building energy demand, sufficient daylighting, and maximum electricity production are chosen. This control strategy can also be numerically evaluated over a year and results show that an adaptive system can have a 20% – 80% energy saving over an equivalent static system. The large range is due to the sensitivity of the building type.
Running this numerical evaluation over eleven building use types spanning six construction periods show that modern offices, schools, and retail stores are ideal application cases. The adaptive envelopes ultimately perform best when there is a mix of both heating and cooling demands in the building space. A CO2 life cycle analysis of the adaptive solar facade shows that it is favourably competitive to traditional building integrated photovoltaic systems.
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
In this paper by Gregory Charles Quinn, Chris J K Williams, and Christoph Gengnagel, a detailed comparison is carried out between established as well as novel erection methods for strained grid shells by means of FE simulations and a 3D-scanned scaled physical model in order to evaluate key performance criteria such as bending stresses during erection and the distance between shell nodes and their spatial target geometry.
In this paper by Frederic Tayeb, Olivier Baverel, Jean-François Caron, Lionel du Peloux, ductility aspects of a light-weight composite gridshell are developed.
In this paper by Julian Lienhard, Holger Alpermann, Christoph Gengnagel and Jan Knippers structures that actively use bending as a self forming process are reviewed.
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