Research progress Arjan Klem

Concept &hypothesis How to create a structural concrete facade that is transparent enough to get a good amount of daylight in and is not made of standardized elements? The growth of a bone structure is nature’s example of a structure reacting to forces applied to it.

Topology optimization; Optimize a shape to the forces applied to it, using the minimum amount of material. A free 2d example program was used to experiment a little with this.

Things I had to do: - Calculate the forces on a standard building - Find a optimization program to calculate the façade of this building The building: 20x20x12 meters Wind load: 1kN/m² Chosen façade thickness: 300mm - This resulted in the input for a program

As the optimization program I use Diana with a optimization script I received from dr. ir. Max Hendriks, who has done some research about optimization in Diana. Now I had to model the input. Optimization in Diana, Max hendriks, May 2007

Some factors are affecting the results: - Mesh Type (triangular/Quadratic) - Mesh division (finer=accurate but slow) - Number of iterations; Every node can be reduced 7 times so the maximum number of iterations is 7*nodes. Sow a finer mesh causes exponentionally more calculating time.

Results of a triangular 24x24 mesh using iterations

Now it raises the question if the Diana calculations are correct: I should somehow create a real model and test it and compare the results with the Diana output. -Downside of using Diana: Calculation times become very long to get accurate results