{"id":53749,"date":"2022-08-18T19:46:50","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T19:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.simscale.com\/?page_id=53749"},"modified":"2024-02-09T11:50:14","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T11:50:14","slug":"kpf-develops-rhino-app-for-early-stage-design","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.simscale.com\/customers\/kpf-develops-rhino-app-for-early-stage-design\/","title":{"rendered":"KPF Develops Rhino App for Early-Stage Design Using SimScale"},"content":{"rendered":"

KPF<\/strong> Develops Rhino App for Early-Stage Design Using SimScale<\/h1> <\/div> <\/div>
\"KPF

Developed microclimate app in less than 3 months<\/p> <\/div>

\"Deployed

Deployed to over 100 architects globally<\/p> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\n \"KPF \n Visit Website<\/a>\n <\/div>\n
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KPF is a unified architectural firm focused on the design of buildings of all types and scales, in all geographic regions. The firm consists of over 700 staff led by 34 principals with offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Abu Dhabi, Berlin, and Singapore. As a global practice, KPF designs lasting architectural solutions that mitigate their lifecycle impact on environmental resources and protect and enhance the wellbeing of the communities they serve.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n

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Given the escalating climate crisis, KPF focuses on resilient architectural solutions that minimize operational and embodied carbon emissions. For this reason, KPF has joined the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and many of its peers in a joint effort to develop the capabilities to design and deliver carbon-neutral buildings by 2030. This institutional effort is paired with developing the environmental expertise of KPF staff through education, knowledge exchange, and awareness. The Environmental Performance Design team in the London and New York offices has been creating innovative tools for early-stage modeling for wind and microclimate studies, using the powerful physics simulation engine from SimScale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Environmental Design and Sustainability at KPF<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The environmental performance team KPFep is an entity that works within the broader technology team, along with digital practice, visualization, urban interface, data science, and applied research. Between the London and New York offices, KPFep currently has five full-time professionals offering support to design teams across the firm to meet their net-zero targets and build up a performance-based approach to design development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Sustainable Design Lead at KPF, Elias focuses on net-zero carbon strategies and on delivering high-performance building design beyond industry standards. The Environmental Performance team at KPF collaborates with design teams at all stages of the process to set the environmental agenda of a project and validate it with qualitative and quantitative performance data, parametric modeling, and iterative analysis. Elias has been leading innovation and technology efforts within the environmental performance team, including exploring new simulation platforms and tools; from wind simulations to early design energy assessment and life cycle modeling. His work also coordinates firm-wide initiatives to minimize the environmental impact of KPF projects, promoting awareness and educating designers about the principles of passive sustainable design and how this can be applied to modern construction methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Elias<\/a>
Elias Anka, Sustainable Design Lead at KPF, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

SimScale offers cloud simulation technology for wind and microclimate studies. Its easy-to-use interface, automated workflows, integrated climate data, and visualization capabilities make it especially useful for architects and designers. SimScale computes building and urban wind simulations an order of magnitude faster than traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools. It is fully transient, meaning it can simulate and animate realistic and time-dependent wind conditions needed to understand complex flow behavior in urban environments. Users can import and simulate city-sized CAD models in minutes and hours compared to days for legacy CFD software. This has empowered architects to deploy wind modeling tools in early-stage competitions and bids, where fast, accurate and cost-effective simulations are needed. At KPF, SimScale is used on live projects and studies for competitive tenders that require a fast turnaround time.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approximately 70% of wind modeling at KPF is used for competitions, and the value proposition that CFD-generated wind and pedestrian wind comfort studies bring to KPF has been proven many times. On live commercial projects, the wind studies conducted by KPF at the early stages provide invaluable insight to specialist wind consultants that might need to undertake wind tunnel studies for planning permissions with local authorities. Early-stage wind modeling has assisted in converging on a final design solution much faster by comparing the relative performance of competing designs and significantly, reducing the time and cost needed downstream during the more costly 3D model-based wind tunnel studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"SimScale<\/a>
A new build project in London. The colored streamlines show an incident wind from the right. The building has been simulated in a virtual wind tunnel using SimScale.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

KPF architects mainly use Rhino\u00ae and Revit\u00ae on the majority of their projects. Both tools are heavily embedded into the design workflow at KPF and offer benefits depending on the design stage. A typical workflow might be to use Rhino at the concept\/massing stage and then move to Revit for the more detailed stages and BIM-enabled drawings that hold performance data. SimScale works seamlessly with both CAD tools. Native Rhino files are quickly imported into SimScale without any CAD cleanup necessary. Likewise, exporting an STL file from Revit is the best approach to preparing complex geometry for simulation, an oft-quoted bottleneck when working with large models. The Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) solver Pacefish\u00ae, integrated into SimScale, offers fully transient external flow simulations. One of the key advantages of this approach is its robustness in importing complex CAD models. Because of the novel physics, the geometry no longer needs to be water-tight, and what used to be classified as imperfect geometry for simulation purposes is now easily handled in SimScale. Architects often quote this feature as the single biggest advantage of using SimScale over other tools.<\/p>\n\n\n <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div><\/section>\n\n\n

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Wind Flow App: Wind Modeling of Urban Environments<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

KPF has gone a step further and, using the SimScale application programming interface (API), has developed an in-house Rhino app that uses the wind modeling engine in SimScale. The API is a way to access the SimScale platform and simulation engine, from any software, for any automated workflow. It is easy to use and comes with a C# and Python SDK. Users can set up a simulation with predefined results processing using a few lines of code. The API has templates for common use cases like simple simulation workflows and parametric studies. The Python SDK has made it accessible to a wide range of users at KPF, and expert support and intuitive documentation have helped KPF to design and develop their app in less than three months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018Wind Flow\u2019 app is currently in beta development, with five architects across London and New York actively using the new tool in competitions and bids. KPF has multi-disciplinary skills in their teams including computational designers, coders, data scientists, and environmental designers. This meant that developing an early-stage microclimate app was an intuitive and logical next step to deploying wind studies across the entire organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The Wind Flow app is intended to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n