In
my term project, I will be working with Egla Qori to create a comprehensive set
of structural families for use in Revit. In particular, we will be
focusing our effort on creating families of typical components of Reinforced
Concrete Building Design, including beams, columns, caissons, slabs, drop panels,
and varying types of each.
The
reason we selected this project was so that we may use the families we create
in our Senior Design Project. Our Senior
Design Project is the structural design of a 40-story hotel in Chicago, IL, for
which we have the actual architectural plan set. It was determined in fall term that we would
pursue a reinforced concrete frame structural system. While Revit has a preexisting collection of
structural families, including almost all of the above components, we hope to
include the possibility of reinforcement detailing within the families, as well
as including any post-tensioning that may be required. As of right now, it appears Revit only has
the ability to specify reinforcement spacing and bar size. [1] We hope to be able to include these in the model,
and just export to a schedule.
The
idea of “Intelligent Buildings” has a lot to do with Revit and streamlining the
modeling process. The most challenging
part of reinforced concrete design is the placement and sizing of reinforcement
and post-tensioning. Revit has been
attempting to make modeling more object oriented, but still has to rely on
geometric and tabulation to handle certain components. We believe that creating these families will
make the modeling process easier for our Senior Design Project, and the
structural plans will be easily generated from the whole model.
The
biggest challenges we will face are in the creation of the families themselves. After the first assignment, we have some
experience in creating families, but that was a very simple example, with only
geometric constraints. We plan to be
able to assign structural properties and detailing within the objects themselves,
which poses a challenge when considering how many permutations of reinforcement
spacing and post-tensioning stress.
Also, considering how large the building we are designing is, there are
likely going to be many types per family, so it is a challenge just to design
that many types and making sure they are all correctly created.
Comments on Others
Andy
Dinh – Your project seems similar to mine, since you are also creating families
in Revit and Bentley to compare the two software. I think it will be interesting to see which
program is easier for this, and I would be interested to see if there are any
advantages to using Bentley for different system families (structures, HVAC,
etc.).
Kerieanne
Vogler – Your project seems really interesting because I feel like the life
cycle analysis of buildings is not something that we like to think of as
designers. I’m actually taking a LCA
class next term and would be interested in seeing how BIM could help make that
easier, because from what I remember from other classes, LCA is really
difficult.
Nick
Pawlikowski – This project is really interesting because it seems to combine
all the major themes we are studying in this class: databases, BIM,
programming. I think the idea for
programmatically generating Revit families would be such a great functionality,
and I’m excited to see if it works out!
References
[1] Wikispaces.
“Introduction to Revit Structure Families.” Web.
Available: http://bim.wikispaces.com/file/view/Introduction+to+Revit+Structure+Families.pdf
