onsdag 1. november 2017

Project Fractal: Brute Force Your Engineering Calculations

Project Fractal has been around for a while now, and I have wanted to test it for what it is worth.
However, the examples I have seen are mostly pointed towards form finding and the architecture side of things, except of course MT Hojgaards excellent example with a parking garage, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-3ts053FV0
In focusing only on formfinding and its like I feel we miss out on a lot of great potential uses for this piece of technology.

What I've been thinking of is how we could make a cross border link between the old way of doing things and the new technology that are evolving so rapidly. I want to bring one of those ideas to the table in hope that it can spur others into doing things like it and create more examples that are really useful. We may even help Autodesk in marketing this product, who knows..

Anyways, At our office we have a lot of "old" excel-sheets for doing calculations of random stuff. Yeah, I know.. It's not BIM-ish, but it's the real world. But what if we could take the intrinsic logic of and intellectual capital invested in those Excel sheets and transfer it into some of the newer tools for parametric and generative design and thereby add value to the already invested time in developing these, really quite advanced, Excel-sheets. And one of the case studies was an Excel-sheet for calculating minimum reinforcement anchoring length. Not entirely sure if that is the correct english term, but I think you catch my drift. The only problem for using this in Fractal was that you can't use scripts that open files, so the downside was that I had to transfer the logic of the standards into Dynamo Studio itself.

Now, once this was done I could upload the Script to Web and log in to fractal to run the script as many times as I wanted and then drag the handles in Fractal to see what kind of input parameters mattered the most for the anchoring length. A great way to apply a brute force way of thinking to existing formulas and standards! :)

In Dynamo Studio:


In Fractal:


(And for the really observant reader and avid Euocode user, you may notice I have taken some liberties when it comes to the actual calculations. As in many proof of concepts! ;) )

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