Ph.D

Mrs  Mousavian Elham will  present his P.H.D thesis on "CAD for the Preliminary Architectural-Structural Layout of Masonry Buildings" in Iran at 17:00 P.M on 27 november 2016.

CAD for the Preliminary Architectural-Structural Layout of Masonry Buildings

Multi-disciplinary approaches at the early stages of design assist designers to solve the various design problems more effectively and efficiently. Accordingly a structurally-sound preliminary architectural design should integrate the architectural and structural considerations to reduce the architectural and structural conflicts at the late stages of design. One of the most important structural design task at the early stages of design is structural layout. The optimal structural layout is to find the most appropriate arrangement of structural elements on an architectural model. The output will be an integrated structural-architectural model which can be implemented for downstream structural and constructability evaluations. Finding the best structural layout solution for a given conventional architectural model mostly is done based on the high degree of experts’ experiences and knowledge. When a number of feasible structural solutions raises by increasing the complexity of architectural design, finding the optimal structural solution becomes a laborious and fallible task.  In this case computer programs can assist designers to obtain better solutions among all possible solutions of a design problem.

In this research an interactive tool has been proposed assisting architects in finding the structurally feasible preliminary building model from two important points of view. At first, the proposed tool assists designers to model initial architectural model according to a set of architectural and structural principles. Structural principles are basic architectural provisions stated in seismic codes. Architectural principles are basic architectural rules which make a model architecturally feasible. In order to make the tool practical at the primary stages of design interactive methods have been proposed facilitating the process of shape exploration.  

At the second stage, the proposed tool tries to find the most appropriate structural layout as the optimally placement of structural elements, including beams, slabs, columns, and load bearing walls on the architectural model generated at previous stage. As discussed the model is able to have different interior spatial layouts at different levels. This research has been specialized for the masonry buildings. The optimal solution has been introduced as a structural layout which maximally transfers loads by using the existing building elements and uses the minimum number of inserted columns and beams. This results in maximum compatibility of structural layout with the architectural model.

To find the optimal structural grid at each level (1) the input floor plan is used to create an initial structural grid. (2) This grid is analyzed and the feasibility of all elements is calculated (3) unstable elements are shown to designer for further decisions. (4) In all slabs adjacent to infeasible elements additional columns are added. The steps (3) and (4) are repeated until there are no more infeasible elements and a stabilized grid is found. (5) On this grid the column optimizer is run which merges columns and returns a minimal stable configuration. (6) Afterwards the arrangement of columns is optimized. This is achieved by a novel non-linear optimization algorithm that tries to optimally distribute loads between existing walls and a minimum number of needed columns.

To validate the tool two methods have been implemented. The first, has evaluated how automated results improve structural layouts comparing to the traditional manual techniques by comparing them via using a set of specific metrics. To validate the proposed simplified structural methods, the results have been compared to the results of Finite Element Analysis to compare the consumed time and the compatibility of the analysis outputs.