Monday, February 3, 2020

B4 - Project Description

Our group, Amanda, Mika, and I, are planning on focusing green and sustainability design using various BIM software. This topic will talk about the advancement of BIM and how it has affected engineers and designers on their process of sustainable design. This topic was chosen because sustainability is something that is always talked about, however, not as well known aside from the popular options, like natural air circulation, low carbon-footprint, etc. Researching this will allow a better understanding of the extents of a sustainable/green building and then being able to tie it into the progression of BIM and its affects, whether it is advantageous, or a disadvantage. 

Its relation to Intelligent Buildings is mainly BIM itself as mentioned above. To dive further, a part of an intelligent building is to be able to analyze the building's system and data to understand how well it is operating. This would help the sustainable design drastically since it would assist the designer/engineer on what should be modified. Furthermore, using BIM, the building may be monitored over time to determine the best performance for the building. 

Having the ability to use BIM to help design sustainability and green would decrease cost and time since BIM would be doing most of the analysis. This would also benefit many other people than just the engineer/designer. As mentioned before, people would be able to consistently monitor the building. An example of BIM software that does sustainable design would be eQuest. It generates an energy analysis of the structure based on the inputs the user does. This allows the user to implement many different ideas and designs to get the best option. 

A few challenges regarding sustainability and green design would be how sustainable does it have to be? A green building certification program, LEED, has a some guidelines on how green the building is which is based on a ranking system. Like any program, LEED has issues which will be addressed in the research.

Comments

Steve: I think your goal for this project is great and makes a lot of sense. Taking advantage of this project to further your knowledge and experience in Revit would definitely make you stand out and be much more of a valued employee.

Andre: I think it is interesting that you are doing this project in an electrical engineering perspective. Having a co-op in electrical design, this would immensely help the design flow in projects and would allow unnecessary mistakes that are bound to happen.

Cory: The ability to prefabricate elements is very beneficial. Like you mentioned, there are definitely pros and cons regarding this type of construction and may be specific towards certain types of constructions only. I do believe that as the field advance, more elements will definitely be prefabricated to reduce the time and cost consumption.

2 comments:

Isabel Brooks said...

I think your project topic is very applicable, particularly at this time in the world. Everyone is very focused on environmental impacts and green initiatives it will be helpful to read into all the different BIM technologies that are helping with that. It's good that your highlighting the decrease in cost too because clients will need to see benefits that are more than just environmental efficiency.

Abigail Kryszan said...

Brian,

I think your research is very relevant to the issues engineers face when designing buildings. The way buildings are built and designed currently just isn't sustainable. Hopefully by researching and discovering uncommon ways to design sustainable buildings, new buildings will be less detrimental to the environment.