thermal performance of a residential building's envelope

Hi, guys! I'm dealing with my master thesis which it's exact topic is "A Building Residential Design in Esfahan/Iran Zone by Focusing on Thermal Performance Optimization of Exterior Wall by Parametric Method". I have studied alot about it but i'm still really confused about and don't know where to start the design!!! :( I wanna use grasshopper which know a little and some simulation applications. can anyone help me...?? I particulary need to know the design method and parameters which affect the thermal performance of the envelope. I'm also trying to limit the effective parameters to have an easier simulatin! on the other hand when limiting the parameters i have to choose the most effective ones for the simulation! please if anyone has some info, help me in this problem!! thank you guys!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 3, 2014 at 11:23am

Hi Leily,

Grasshopper is a tool that can be used to compute or automate specific tasks. It is not suited as a design methodology. When you start with your research project, you first have to write down the goals and methods you're going to use. Along with a justification regarding the relevance of the central question.

Once you have a methodology that you can defend on an academic level, the next step is to plan a pragmatic approach; i.e. how are you going to try and apply your methodology? You may find that parts of the approach involve a large amount of computation or simulation, at which point you need to decide what algorithms to use to perform these calculations. Along with this choice, you also need to define how to validate the results without checking the computation by hand, and the extend in which limitations and simplifications play a role.

The title of your topic is spurious, in that it already presumes pragmatic considerations:

"A Building Residential Design in Esfahan/Iran Zone by Focusing on Thermal Performance Optimization of Exterior Wall by Parametric Method"

(emphasis mine)

This is fine for a paper title, which is a document describing how you solved Problem X using Method Y, but it sounds like you're still in the process of formulating the research question.

I wrote a blog post a while back which contains some views I hold with respect to the academic honesty of many architecture curricula. It also contains some (very) basic statements/opinions/guidelines for performing academic research.

Permalink Reply by kimia farahnak on December 9, 2015 at 4:40am

well at least you convinced me:D tnx david

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on December 9, 2015 at 8:41am

Hi David,

I'm enjoying your blog post but having a hard time reading it because the font is so small. So I find this statement of yours in the blog post a bit ironic:

The choice of font is awkward. If we are meant to read this, why not present it in an easy-to-read typeface?

It's not the typeface of your blog but the font size; using Chrome developer tools, I can disable your default "font-size: 62.5%;" and read it easily.

Cheers

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 3, 2014 at 12:25pm

Guess I didn't convince her...

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on October 3, 2014 at 12:45pm