Optimization of building shape and orientation for minimizing insolation -

Abstract

With the increasing concern about the environment and attempts to reduce living costs many architects are trying to determine an optimal shape for their buildings in the preliminary stages of construction to minimize its absorption of solar energy. As a result this reduces CO2 emissions and energy cost for cooling. A considerable number of architects still do this task by hand. In this thesis, we provide a tool that optimizes the shape of a building automatically. We consider minimizing the building's insolation as an optimization problem, where we try to optimize the shape of the building to absorb minimal solar energy. In our work we take into consideration the surrounding environment, and we implement an algorithm to get real sun locations and intensities at different times of the day to get accurate results. Our demonstration prototype includes a real time ray tracing visualization and a friendly interface, to enable the user to interact with our program and observe how the optimization is progressing.