ARCHITECTURAL TOPOLOGICAL FORM-FINDING INTEGRATING SOLID AND FLUID STRUCTURAL PERFORMANCES

With the recent developments of digital architecture techniques, performance-based optimisation has been an essential topic in architecture design. Using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and structural topology optimisation algorithms, designers can easily generate architectural forms with high mechanical performances and unique elegant shapes. Comfortable and pleasant architectural microenvironments can also be designed with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques. However, the architectural form-finding method integrating the above two aspects remains a current research hotspot with room for further exploration. This paper presents an innovative Fluid-Structure-Interaction (FSI) topological optimisation workflow for optimising architectural forms based on both inner solid and surrounding fluid mechanics. This framework consists of three basic parts: (1) fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis of buildings and their surroundings, (2) automatic modelling of building forms & surrounding environments, and (3) architectural evolutions referred to gradient-based theory. The research aims to construct an innovative architectural morphological topology optimisation algorithm based on the integration of solid and fluid structural performances. The method also shares the potential to coordinate the diverse architectural physical requirements in the form-finding process for complex building contexts,