In the 21st century, technology is advancing rapidly, affecting a wide range of careers and industries. Building envelope design in civil engineering is no exception. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained popularity in recent years. This article explores how AI is being used in building envelope design.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence, while not a recent development, has garnered considerable interest nowadays. Sci-fi movies and other forms of media fill our minds with narratives of robot takeover and chaos. In reality, AI has been a part of our everyday technology for decades. AI is computer programming that accomplishes tasks that would otherwise require human intervention and intelligence. From cellular devices to motion sensors, AI has been working, learning, and serving our world for quite some time. In the building envelope design industry, AI has already been incorporated and is making a significant impact.
Use in Design
AI expedites the building envelope design process, enhancing efficiency and accuracy in reaching optimal solutions with fewer resources. One way AI building design is through energy efficiency. It is estimated that 40% of energy consumed worldwide is from buildings. With the responsibility for building envelope design companies to create energy efficient designs, AI integrates with building management systems to ensure that all factors are considered. AI can learn the comfort level of the building’s occupants, analyzing optimal comfort, safety, light, and even oxygen usage. Using this data, building exteriors can be designed with these analytics in mind, adjusting design features and materials to best accommodate the building’s needs. For example, if a company allows a hybrid work schedule, an AI system can analyze occupancy in each building, floor, or cubicle and adjust energy usage accordingly. Furthermore, with the help of this technology, an envelope system can be designed to adapt to the amount of people that are working in a given building or floor.
External factors such as temperature, humidity, air quality and natural disasters can be analyzed by AI. The data gathered can create predictions for sensors to adjust energy usage accordingly. Building envelope design engineers can use these predictive algorithms to influence their designs and incorporate the ideas into their existing algorithms. An extension of this concept can be utilized in structural health monitoring (SHM,) where AI provides real time data on overall structural health and solutions to engineers. AI has the ability to predict when building components might fail and schedule maintenance accordingly.
A recent case study used AI algorithms to expedite the civil engineering design process, yielding positive results. The study began with a decision-making process to mathematically model the design of a planar truss bridge, followed by reinforcement learning for automatic design and refinement solutions. The results indicated a12% improvement in accuracy and an 88% increase in computational efficiency over traditional methods. This demonstrates AI’s potential to enhance engineering work to a more efficient and accurate level.
Use in Business
Building envelope design engineering requires parameters such as plastic rotations, axial deformations, and story drifts. However, AI can use algorithms to predict and include stakeholder concerns such as repair costs, repair time, risks to human life, and environmental impacts. Besides specific engineering aspects, AI can automate design processes related to the business side of engineering. It can more efficiently analyze risks, spot errors, identify potential problems, expedite project management, provide accurate cost estimation, and improve communication between engineers and other professionals. AI can also suggest cheaper materials that maintain the quality and safety of designs.
One aspect of the business side of building envelope design is writing. Often, writing takes up time that could be spent on other projects. With AI assistance, complex writing tasks can be automated. Additionally, AI can help with writing technical concepts with more transaction-friendly diction, potentially increasing business.
As firms grow, the amount of data needing to be processed increases. AI can analyze a much larger set of data than numerical calculations done by an engineer, and it does so in a shorter amount of time, thus making the engineering business more effective and efficient.
Conclusion
AI is not here to replace humanity, much less engineers. Humans will always be needed for creativity and passion. Rather, AI is here to aid building envelope design engineers in enhancing efficiency and accuracy in both design and business.
By Aquinas Engineering
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