Applications of BIM in early stages of High-Rise Building Design
Within the AEC industry, BIM is currently being used in numerous fields. Even yet, there isn't much usage of BIM technology to evaluate the structural performance of high-rises early in the design phase. Early design decisions significantly affect a building's overall performance regarding energy, environmental effects, and operating expenses. Facilities may be more likely to meet high-performance goals if moral choices are made at this stage. BIM technology can help with these decisions by providing information on a building's performance before its physical construction.
Due to sustainable development, urban compactness, housing urgency, and emerging technologies, a growing interest is being seen in living in tall buildings. Hong Kong and Singapore are two prominent instances of the 36 million Asian households residing in high-rise structures. According to CTBUH, 6588 buildings taller than 150, 600, and 300 meters were built in more than 60 nations.
Incorporating BIM into a high-rise building's early design phase
Using BIM during the planning stage of a high-rise building facilitates the assessment of the project's success before construction. Previous investigations and studies demonstrate that the primary purpose of BIM is to increase a high-rise structure's energy efficiency and, thus, lower its carbon emissions. However, the building's financial analysis and structural design show relatively little use of BIM workflow in the early planning stages. One of the best examples is How BIM is used in the Empire State Building project.
The application of BIM for enhanced performance of tall buildings can be grouped into seven broad areas following careful examination of earlier scholarly research and studies.
The identified areas of application are:
- Energy Efficiency Analysis and Performance
BIM technologies can enhance energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in tall buildings by optimizing building envelopes, ventilation systems, and occupant behaviors. Studies show that optimizing envelope characteristics can lead to 42% energy savings, improving the interface between indoor and outdoor environments. The ventilation systems significantly influence the building envelope's energy performance. BIM can simplify the design phase by ensuring a system that improves energy efficiency without compromising comfort.
- Collaborative Design Platform
Due to the growing complexity of construction projects, design teams, stakeholders, architects, and engineers must work together. High-rise buildings are a good place for BIM to be beneficial because it helps promptly identify design flaws and problems. A BIM-based framework that addresses data format exchange, multi-specialty, multi-party, and lightweight engagement can enhance high-rise structures' collaborative design and planning.
- Life Cycle Assessment and Analysis
Life cycle assessment is a dependable technique for assessing a product or service's inputs, outputs, and environmental effects. BIM has gained momentum with the development of tools like Tally for Autodesk Revit software to quantify the ecological impacts of building materials based on LCA techniques. LCA evaluation systems based on BIM also make comprehensive data on building properties available.
- Design of Net Zero Buildings
Net zero energy buildings aim to generate as much renewable energy as they consume in a year while maintaining operational buildings. Structures must be built with renewable energy systems and energy-efficient design and construction. Virtual BIM Coordination is necessary to be utilized to optimize high-rise building designs. A 33% decrease in energy could be obtained by optimizing parameters through a multi-objective optimization strategy that employed EnergyPlus, Rhino, and Grasshopper software.
- Integration with smart visualization technologies
Integrating BIM with smart visualization technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) enhances building design and decision-making. Users can engage with objects in a virtual environment using AR and VR, improving the early design and planning stages. Optimizing building design procedures using BIM and cutting-edge visualization technology may be possible.
- Cost analysis to optimize designs
Early in the architectural design process, BIM can reduce reworks and boost project returns. It helps spot possible conflicts and poor design, particularly in towering buildings. The financial advantages of energy efficiency are also translated into decisions on building systems, services, and components using BIM.
- Structural Design Performance
The successful implementation of building designs depends on the collaboration between architects and engineers, particularly in the case of today's increasingly complex architecture. Engineers and architects frequently work alone, which results in realistic architectural designs that conflict with structural designs. Building design optimization and gap closure are possible with BIM. Structural models can be automatically generated and updated based on architectural inputs thanks to integrating architectural and structural models provided by a BIM-based framework. This method can assist engineers in designing buildings that satisfy the requirements.
If applied early in the design process, the above applications of the BIM approach for high-rise structure design can improve project productivity in all phases.
Conclusion
Given the complexity and high energy consumption of high-rise buildings, it can be concluded that early implementation of Building Information Modeling is essential. Building Information Modeling is typically utilized in tall buildings to enhance the energy efficiency of architectural designs by optimizing various building envelope aspects. But this post also covered other application areas in great detail and the advantages of utilizing BIM in them.
