Introduction
Each year, Dr. Renate Fruchter and the PBL Lab at Stanford University hosts a global teamwork event, bringing together students, faculty, and industry mentors from five disciplines to collaborate on designing and building university building projects. This year’s event theme was "Generative Minds for a Better World," with three specific competition challenges: a sustainability challenge, a productivity challenge, and a technology challenge focusing on sustainable, intelligent, and high-performance buildings. Three student teams competed to design projects which meet these challenges.
The three teams leveraged their individual skillsets including architecture, structural engineering, construction management, MEP engineering, and construction financials to deliver incredible projects. They also leveraged best-in-class software platforms including ALICE, Finch, Manufacton, Revit, Fuzor, and KOPE to design and optimize their projects.
Prefabrication and Design Optimization with KOPE
Pacific Team’s modular kit of parts
Working as a unified team, Pacific Team developed a flexible kit of parts for moveable interior wall panels. This addressed their design concept to allow reconfigurable interior spaces which would support university education today and in the future. Additionally, the team used KOPE to generate cold-formed steel and drywall prefabricated panels for the permanent interior walls.
KOPE’s optimization engine allowed the team to instantly place the drywall panels into their project, quickly redesign as the project evolved over 40 iterations, and optimizing the panels into types to increase manufacturing efficiencies. Each iteration resulted in a revised prefab layout, allowing downstream analysis to be done to the project schedule, installation sequence, and prefab production process.
The team also used KOPE to optimally fit façade panels to the geometry of the exterior of the project, resulting in 162 panels with 16 panel types.
Central Team’s Sustainable Prefabrication
The Central Team identified internal and external wall panels as great opportunities for prefabrication. Additionally, the team 3D modeled all of the MEP systems required in the building and used KOPE to configure cold-formed steel framing around the MEP penetrations, allowing complete offsite prefabrication to be done to speed onsite installation and reduce ad-hoc jobsite coordination.
The team then optimized their prefabrication scheme and compared CO2 emissions to ‘baseline’ project designs, resulting is 52% reduction in CO2 emissions in their interior and exterior panels.
By leveraging technologies like prefabrication to improve construction time, they reduced the time for design iterations, were able to optimize materials, and generate offsite production and onsite delivery schedules.
Island Team’s Mass Timber Factory
The island team took a different approach: they developed a new building product factory that produces bamboo-based mass timber products. This locally-sourced material provides local jobs and workforce training as well as reducing the costs of material that would otherwise be shipped long distances to their Puerto Rico-based project.
The team also introduced a material passport to the products they produce, leveraging unique element ID generation in KOPE to track the lifecycle of these building products. This allows their project to achieve wider sustainability targets by tracking end-of-life waste management pathways in projects they source materials to.
Conclusion
Congratulations to these three student project teams for their incredible work this year. And thanks to Dr. Renate Fruchter, Martin Fischer and the rest of the Stanford CIFE group, as well as the industry sponsors, DPR Construction, Swinerton Builders, and AR Green Consulting for their work to enable this project course.
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