Bringing Buildings To Life
Could buildings imitate living organisms? Negin Imani has created a tool translating natural thermoregulation strategies into architectural solutions.
Biomimetic Thermal Regulation in Buildings
While several biological thermal adaptation strategies are currently translated to and employed in sustainable building design, they, represent at best a simple translation of the intricate mechanisms of thermal adaptation in nature.
A Big Jump From Biomimicry
A new generation of buildings could be fully-automated, smart buildings that exactly imitate what a living organism does. This requires the architecturally-equivalent thermoregulation solution to function in exactly in the same way as biological strategies do, including almost every aspect of a living being: locomotion, reproduction, growth and development, and respiration, with a complex hierarchical organisation of components
Biologists Confirm the Inclusiveness of Biomimetic Design Tool for Building Energy Efficiency
Biologist confirmed the ThBA is effective in bridging biology and architecture based on the existing thermal challenges in buildings, and is comprehensive in terms of generalising biological thermal adaptation strategies.
A Framework for Finding Inspiration in Nature
Biomimicry has attracted the attention of scholars and architects because of its potential for contributing to the design of energy efficient buildings. Given the importance of energy efficient buildings in reducing global building energy consumption, the aim of this research was to investigate the practical usefulness of a framework developed for designing bio-inspired energy efficient office buildings.
Thermo-Bio-Architectural Framework (ThBA)
The ThBA was developed by studying biology to find how thermal regulation strategies used by living organisms can be classified and generalised. The proposed ThBA was confirmed and evaluated before it was used for the rest of the research.
Energy Efficiency and Biomimetics
Testing the ThBA for two extreme climates in New Zealand, highlighted the fact that the simple translation of the majority of biological thermal adaptation principles are being used by architects, although for some, the architectural equivalents did not function in exactly in the same way as biological thermoregulation strategies.
SlowLoris
SlowLoris can be web-based and is totally independent of all current energy data visualisation software and complementary energy plugins. It uses the Grasshopper interface and its components to construct graphs. It is mainly targeted at optimising the visual representation of energy results and does not need highly skilled experts to be used effectively.
Bio-inspired Office Buildings: A Workflow For Improving Thermal Performance
In the next Ecology & Evolution Seminar Series, Negin Imani will be talking about her PhD research on bio-inspired energy efficient building design.