Swift: Building physics for Grasshopper

Swift brings the power of ODS Studio to Rhino and Grasshopper. Swift allows rapid design and analysis of commercial and residential building design. It brings together powerful industry-standard tools to create a platform for multi-physics simulation including CFD (including Wind, Air, Pollutant transport), Energy and Daylighting.

Latest release: SwiftDownload object

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Requirements: Windows 10 (build 1607+ or higher), Rhino 5

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Example files

See for yourself how it works. Download these example files to get started.

v0.2.x Example/Demo Files

Install/Register

A simple file for getting free Registration of your Swift.

Dictionary Overrides

Swift uses dictionary overrides to enable fast, clean and replicable setup of CFD case folders. This tutorial explains in detail how dictionary overrides are managed in Swift.

Simple External CFD (one wind direction)

This tutorial walks you through the setup of a typical CFD case in Swift. The case is a simple external CFD flow over some blocks for a single wind direction only.

Virtual Wind Tunnel (multiple wind directions)

This shows the setup of a case for the calculation of multiple wind directions using the Virtual Wind Tunnel. In this case 8 wind directions are solved. The Virtual Wind Tunnel is the basis for many more advanced calculations such as wind and urban comfort mapping and assessment of facade pressures.

Fast probe multiple patches

Probing of the results on arbitrary groups of points. This could be, for example, probe points above each balcony of a large building.

Virtual Wind Tunnel (Advanced 1)

This shows the setup of a Virtual Wind Tunnel with three advanced features: 1) starting from a circular mesh to give a more effective use of the turtable area; 2) overriding the boundary conditions for particular angles (during run-time) in order to simulate varying terrain around the site of interest; and 3) defining terrain types (eg. countryside, suburban and urban) in a nice drop-down list to select for the boundary condition.

Wind Comfort Mapping (Lawson Criteria)

This tutorial demonstrates the use of the Virtual Wind Tunnel to assess the percentage of time that wind speeds exceed threshold velocities. The results from this calculation may be used to map regions according to the Lawson Criteria for wind comfort.

Buoyant Boussinesqu PIMPLE

Transient heat-transfer using the BuoyantBoussinesquPimpleFoam solver. To run the SIMPLE (steady-state) solver, just replace the solver definition with "buoyantBoussinesquSimpleFoam".

Remote Execution over Network

Setup of the "simpleExternalCFD" demo including the configuration and instructions for setting up and running over a network from your local machine. This allows you to use a lot of CPUs available over your network.

v0.2.x Additional Files/Utilities/Requirements

OpenFOAM Extensions

git clone https://github.com/ODSEngineering/foamExtensions cd foamExtensions && git checkout -b OpenFOAM-v2.x origin/OpenFOAM-v2.x OR for versions of OpenFOAM >= 4 cd foamExtensions && git checkout -b OpenFOAM-v5.x origin/OpenFOAM-v5.x

Scripts, tools, utilities and extra files

Refer to https://github.com/ODSEngineering for additional scripts, utilies, tools and helper files which may be created. Particularly the repository: https://github.com/ODSEngineering/SwiftSupport

FAQs

  • Why this project?

    • Swift focusses on bringing commercially viable building physics into Grasshopper. Swift is basically a port of the powerful ODS Studio framework for Blender. In many aspects we believe ODS Studio was, and still is, the most powerful building physics framework available however it never achieved a complete user-base due to the Blender platform. Swift is focussing on bringing the best parts of ODS Studio into the Grasshopper environment. Specifically, Swift focusses on clean, fast workflows and easy setup for primarily commercial application.
  • What about Butterfly/Ladybug/Honeybee?

    • Those are great tools for sure. However we still believe Swift fills some areas of the workflow that may be lacking or missing in other projects. Specifically, Swift focusses on cleaner Grasshopper workflows (less components and less complex spaghetti soup) resulting in faster setup and usability for real-world commercial projects. Other tools are very good at the post-processing and visualisation end, while Swift focusses more on the pre and actual processing phases to give fast setup and processing optimised for multi-core. We will try to develop Swift so that it remains compatible with the Ladybug suite of tools as much as possible so that you can use the best of Swift and Ladybug. In the future we would love to bring the projects closer together, who knows, maybe even merging them. But for now the nature of Grasshopper should allow you to use the best of both tools that work for you.

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