Solar Fan + Solar Envelope with Ladybug

I received multiple emails about solar fan and solar envelope and if I want to add this components to Ladybug. Here is how you can calculate both of them with shading designer!

Attachments:

solarFan_solaeEnvelope.gh, 71 KB

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on January 22, 2015 at 9:01am

Hi Jacob and Saeran, I understand that technically solar envelope doesn't consider the context but there is a way to do it with Ladybug (and that's why we have two sets of components for solar envelope and solar fan.)

One of solar envelop components accepts sunVectors for input which means you can generate sun vectors from sunpath and filter them based on intersections using Grasshopper native components and use them to calculate the envelop.

Mostapha

Permalink Reply by Jacob VDR on January 22, 2015 at 11:05am

Saeran, thanks for your input. And that link to that paper is super helpful!

Mostapha, that first component pictured above is the one I've been trying to use and I'm glad to know that it should work. I'm still pretty new to grasshopper and not sure the best way to go about getting the sun vectors to recognize my site context. I will keep trying though.

Thanks,

Jacob

Permalink Reply by Saeran Vasanthakumar on January 22, 2015 at 2:01pm

Ah apologies, my bad! Great to know that you guys have figured this out.

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on January 22, 2015 at 5:41pm

Saeran,

Everything that you posted is awesome and that paper from my school is super-interesting. There is another developer named Boris who has been working on something similar for Ladybug. With his method for generating the solar envelope, you will put in context breps of neighboring buildings that require solar access instead of taking everything outside the boundary of the site as requiring solar access (what happens currently). Last I checked, his calculation times were huge and he was trying to get this down but it seemed like he would have it ready in the near future. I will try to remember to post back here if he is nearing completion.

Jacob VDR,

In the meantime, if you are looking for a method that is going to be really sensitive to surrounding context, I think that your best bet is to do sunlight hours studies (I know that it's a different method but it's the best that we have right now). The ability to select out specific solar vectors that Mostapha pointed out is only useful for qualifying the type of solar access you want (ie. for vegetation, for daylighting, etc). The idea is that you can use the sunpath to select out sun vectors based on radiation or outdoor illumuinance and then plug those into the solar fan/envelope. As they stand right now, the solar fan and envelope components are not made to be sensitive to variations in surrounding context and they thus treat all surrounding context as uniform.

I hope that this was helpful,

-Chris

Permalink Reply by Saeran Vasanthakumar on January 22, 2015 at 10:56pm

Cool Chris, I'm really interested in checking out Boris' tool.

I agree, the iso solar tool is pretty exciting. Arguably it's the current state-of-the-art in terms of these 'solar voluming tools'. I started coding a version of it with Ladybug, but had to abandon it in favour of other projects (I think it's still floating around somewhere on my git account). That being said, I'd like to have version of it so if no one else tackles it in the Ladybug community, I'll see if I can do so, and post an update here.

@Jacob

Reinforcing Chris' point about the sunlight hours studies, you might want to check out section 3.2 of this paper: http://naturalfrequency.com/articles/solar-availability-cities . There's a couple of options there, but I think a grid of sunlight studies is one of the more effective methods of capturing the effect of context geometry.

- S

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on February 26, 2015 at 8:25pm

Hi Saeran,

Do you maybe have a file of the paper? Can't seem to find it and the site seems to be down.

Kind regards,

Theodore.

Permalink Reply by Saeran Vasanthakumar on April 14, 2015 at 11:25am

Hello, sorry I missed your request. It looks like the site's up again so I hope you had a chance to read it.

For anyone else, if the site goes down again these are the details:

Solar Availability in Cities
ISSN: 1833-7570, Issue No. 006, May 15, 2012
Solar Availability in Cities: A Design Approach
By: Spyros Stravoravdis and Andrew Marsh.

Probably can get it from cumincad, or the like.

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on May 24, 2015 at 8:10pm

Hi Saeran, Mostapha, and Chris,

I was wondering if there is a way of achieving this with Ladybug/Honeybee and Rhino. It seems like an amazing analysis.

I am going to try native components perhaps but a heads up of do's and dont's would be great!

Is there some option of creating a 3d grid for sunlight studies?

And if there is can we run sunlight studies on 3d grids with Ladybug/Honeybee?

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Theodore.

Permalink Reply by Saeran Vasanthakumar on May 25, 2015 at 1:07am

Sweet, I think it'll be pretty cool.

Off the top of my head, the workflow I would suggest is modelling a series of planar surfaces, and then applying, one by one, the radiation analysis on them.

I don't think a 3d grid would work, for the same reason you'd have to run the radiation analyses separately: you're going to want to avoid self-shading geometries. This is only a pain if you want a denser 3D grid, in which case you might want to look into creating a GH or Python script script to automate the isolation and application of your radiation analysis.

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on May 25, 2015 at 1:20am

Hi Saeran,

Thanks for your reply. I was also thinking that a dense grid would take immense calculation times.

I'm also leaning towards the planar surfaces idea. I think drawings isolines of different illuminance values on each plane and then using GH native components to create 3d surfaces from these isolines could do the trick. It would be rough but ideally there could be some automation on increasing accuracy (i.e. number of planes). I wonder if the parametric definition by Mostapha can be adjusted for this.

Anyways, I'm not as versed in GH scripting but I'll let everyone know if I had some success.

Regards,

Theodore.

Permalink Reply by Leonardo Roli on February 26, 2015 at 3:20am

Hi Guys!

I've read all this discussion, which is very helpful.. But I still have a huge question: how to combine the "solar constraints" with habitability (or, if you prefer, functionality)? I'll try to explain myself with an example:

Here you can see my case of study (which is Fort Point District... I think I understand that Chris is from Boston). As you can see the shapes deriving from the Gh def. are considerably smallar than the buildings around.. But I need to obtain buildings at least of 5-6 storey.. and the ones that you see here are just 1 or 2 storey tall.

Obviously, reducing the amount of imputs (such as a minor number of months or days), the solar envelope would be taller.. So, according to you, what is the way to find a good balance between constraints and functionality?

Thanks a lot!

Permalink Reply by Leonardo Roli on February 26, 2015 at 9:47am

After a day spent working on it, I'd like to complicate more my question.. How to achieve this:

maximum sun exposure at ground + maximum exposure for solar roof + maximal building's habitability.

Any suggestion?

Thank you again!