Consider the city dynamics – the intangible real-time data flow from the city, the invisible changing and unpredictable nature of a city. How will this influence the collaborative process and outcomes for designing dynamic and responsive architecture? The cluster is interested in making the intangible tangible, riding and analysing the real-time data flow, integrating performative and tactile design decisions to hands-on “make and do” physical and digital prototyping. This cluster will perform multiple rapid iterations of modelling, prototyping, and testing of digital and physical representations.

Comparative testing

Posted on by ben

This is a work in progress, more content will be added soon

We have a mini wind tunnel with a fairly small throat, Vasari, Ansys, openFOAM and a big wind tunnel. What are the odds that they’ll give us results that are roughly the same? Will some way of testing give vastly misleading results?

Vasari is by far the easiest to use, but it’s ready made boundary conditions don’t seem to represent real life in any particularly meaningful way.

The tests demonstrate two models run in Vasari as a means of comparing the program against a physical model in the small wind tunnel and against the CFD results of ANSYS . One is a cube built within a box matching the dimensions of the small wind tunnel and the other is a cube with only a base built into the model.

From the results of the first wind tunnel simulation it is evident that the walls have a significant effect on the wake of the cube. The second test results have similar velocity solution to the tests run by Arup in ANSYS. The results are not as close for the pressure simulation.

Little wind tunnel

Big wind tunnel

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blueCAPE tools

Posted on by ben

blueCAPE are a company that make a few CFD tools for building designers. They’ve got a tool ( gbXML2STL Exporter) that allows you to export GBXML and then convert it to CFD ready stl files. They also make a cross compiled version of openFoam so that it runs in windows (which you can get around if you use my VM), but most interestingly they are about to release a wrapper around the whole lot that seems to make things nice and easy to do!

JPIV, Particle Image Velocimetry Software (Open Source).

Posted on by Rafael

JPIV is a Open Source Software for free.  http://www.jpiv.vennemann-online.de/index.html

PIV is an optical technique for measuring the displacement of particle pattern. PIV ist mostly used for flow velocity measurements. In contrast to many other techniques, that measure the velocity of a single point, PIV provides information about the two dimensional velocity distribution, or more precise, about the distribution of two cartesian velocity components parallel to a measurement plane.

JPIV is useful for:

  • multi-pass, multi-grid, FFT based PIV evaluation
  • sum of correlation ensemble evaluation
  • single pixel ensemble evaluation
  • vector field filtering, outlier detection
  • calculation of vorticity and other derivatives
  • 3d velocity field reconstruction
  • image display (png, tif, pgm, imx, im7)
  • vector field display
  • vector field graphics export (eps, pdf, emf, svg, png, jpeg, …)
  • velocity profile extraction, flow estimation
  • vector field statistics
  • command line control and scripting via BeanShell
  • batch processing of a list of files as well as directories

Smoke

JPIV vectors

Animation of smoke and vectors (post-processing with GIMP).

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Posted on by Daniel

Evocative paper and ink drawings by architect Peter Jellitsch.

This series is based on a motion algorithm that is used in architectural practice to simulate wind directions and the force of air that arrives at highrise buildings. I have experimented with this program, and the outcome was solid bubbles which I have then redrawn with the directions that they had. The degree denotation that my title has (for example: STB/S02/90°) is explaining the turn of the wind-force hitting the object.

See full set on Flickr

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