BrainBox AI, headquartered in Montreal, Canada, has launched the Autonomous Decarbonisation solution suite, which it describes as an end-to-end sustainability platform for commercial and retail real estate portfolio owners.

The decarbonisation solution is designed to directly address the 38% of global greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted annually by commercial buildings by measuring, reducing, and offsetting them, thereby supporting building owners in their journeys to net zero and carbon neutrality.

“Your building is currently emitting 30% more GHG emissions than it should. That stat is scary but solvable” comments BrainBox AI CEO Sam Ramadori.“Our new solution suite not only grants commercial and retail real estate owners the capability to measure their emissions, but autonomously implements optimisation strategies that can reduce emissions by up to 40%. Our award-winning AI technology pinpoints and addresses both operational and environmental inefficiencies in buildings in real time.”

This software uses deep learning, cloud computing and custom algorithms. It can be used to generate a ‘full scope 1 & 2, audit grade GHG assessment’ powered by the building’s data and trusted emissions factors to help identify operational inefficiencies. In addition, individual building analysis compares a building’s energy usage intensity (EUI) to other comparable buildings with a view to demonstrating energy and emissions reduction potential.

BrainBox AI’s autonomous AI-tech can also be layered onto existing heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. According to the company, it learns, modulates, and optimises building HVAC systems, resulting in a reduction of operational carbon emissions by up to 40% and a decrease in energy costs by up to 25%.

The software can also access ‘high quality carbon credits’ through a voluntary market. The virtual marketplace supports multiple types of options like carbon-capture technology, nature-based solutions, and renewable energy projects.

“What we are hearing from our customers and the market is that measurement without action is not nearly enough to get us where we need to be” said Omar Tabba, Chief Product Officer at BrainBox AI. “With this new product category, not only can we autonomously reduce carbon emissions using our AI technology, but we can also offer the tools to accurately and precisely measure where operational optimisation can take place and offer clients a solution to explore and take part in the voluntary carbon markets – all in one platform.”

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Preoptima has launched its ‘Carbon Twin’ software for creating dynamic carbon replicas of as-designed and as-built assets.

The cloud platform and API combine transparent and geolocated carbon coefficient data with real structural modelling, regulatory compliance, and accurate material quantities to create Carbon Twins that facilitate ongoing optimisation and embodied carbon avoidance of building designs.

Users can import their own geometry or use the built in generative design tool to analyse ‘hundreds of thousands of low-carbon design iterations in minutes.’

According to the climate tech startup, unlike other life cycle assessment (LCA) software which requires material quantities information to perform an assessment, Preoptima’s early-stage material quantities generation lowers the barrier to entry for all building stakeholders to mitigate the carbon in their projects.

Other new features include the integration of building services (MEP) and operational energy modelling using UK and US grid decarbonisation scenarios.

Preoptima expects the software will be able to model all required building systems and types, as well as existing buildings by the close of this year.

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Bentley Systems has announced new capabilities for carbon assessment in iTwin Experience, its cloud product for visualising and navigating ‘digital twins’.

Infrastructure professionals can now ‘fully automate’ embodied carbon calculation reports and impact analyses without the need to  develop proprietary iTwin-powered apps.

In 2022, Bentley developed an integration service in the iTwin Platform to automate the process of generating embodied carbon reports for infrastructure projects via One Click LCA and EC3.

With this workflow, reports are initiated using the iTwin Platform and then viewed in One Click LCA or EC3.

Now, iTwin Experience provides a bi-directional integration with EC3, enabling carbon assessments to be visualized within a digital twin.

iTwin Experience exports a data model to EC3, a free tool that performs the embodied carbon calculations and returns results that iTwin Experience ‘seamlessly reads and visualises’.

The capabilities also unlock the integration of carbon assessment workflows with other Bentley products and solutions for designing and managing infrastructure projects.

“Lifecycle assessments, environmental footprint analyses, and reports are becoming standard requirements for infrastructure projects worldwide,” said Kaustubh Page, director of product management with Bentley Systems. “Designers and environmental engineers spend critical time generating environmental assessments or reports. Because the required data needed to be manually exported from multiple design authoring tools and then aggregated and verified, generating these environmental assessments has been a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process.

“With these new capabilities built into iTwin Experience, it is feasible to transform what is typically a six-month process into a six-minute workflow. Our goal is for iTwin Experience users to spend their valuable time on designing, optimising, and making better decisions, faster – not exporting, aggregating, and validating data.”

“We want to enable users to implement carbon analysis and optimization as a natural, repeatable, and standardized procedure, as part of managing every type of infrastructure project, anywhere in the world,” added Rodrigo Fernandes, Director of ES(D)G with Bentley Systems.

“The sooner that carbon assessment is integrated into an infrastructure project, the bigger the carbon reduction opportunities will be. This announcement is focused on embodied carbon, particularly relevant in the early project stages, but iTwin Experience unleashes opportunities for telling the whole ‘carbon story’ of an infrastructure project and asset. We are genuinely unlocking environmental footprint assessments powered by infrastructure digital twins.”

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The UK Met Office has launched a new Climate Data Portal to help organisations better understand and respond to climate change through improved access to climate data.

Built using geospatial technology from Esri UK, the portal makes it easier for any business or government organisation to combine open climate data with their own data and reveal the future impact of extreme conditions on their operations, including heatwaves, floods or droughts.

The main users are expected to be within government, construction, engineering, land use, urban planning, transport and energy industries.

The portal aims to present complex scientific climate projections in easy-to-use formats, ready to visualise and analyse in GIS and non-spatial applications or integrate into business processes for improved decision making.

Spatial analysis can be performed at a global, regional or local level enabling location-specific action plans to be developed.

“Historically, climate science has defined the problem, now it’s moving to help with the solution, providing information at a local level which is highly relevant to UK organisations,” explained Professor Jason Lowe, Head of Climate Services at the Met Office. “By combining the Met Office’s latest projections with Esri UK’s geospatial tools, the reach and value of this data is greatly extended.

“UK stakeholders can investigate their physical climate risks over the next 50 to 100 years. The most detailed climate projections reveal a greater chance of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers and these help users plan and prepare for extreme weather, climate change and the reporting which new regulations, linked to climate change, will require.”

“The Climate Data Portal is a giant step forward in making climate data more usable for UK stakeholders,” commented Pete Wilkinson, managing director of Esri UK. “Climate change presents a major challenge and this challenge is a geographic one. Using geospatial technology as a delivery mechanism for climate data makes it quickly accessible and usable in spatial and temporal analysis, helping to identify at-risk areas and develop location-specific action plans.”

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Climate tech company IES and global construction consultancy Soben have formed a strategic partnership to help prioritise decarbonisation in the built environment and make it more financially feasible.

The agreement will enable Soben’s ‘accurate and up-to-date’ cost data to be incorporated into IES’ ‘digital twin’ technology.

The aim is to provide organisations with data-driven insights to help make informed decisions and accelerate the journey towards net-zero carbon emissions. Firms can ‘roadmap’ energy, carbon, capital, and operational savings, while simultaneously considering resource use, transport, social, and economic factors.

According to IES, the joint offering capitalises on the strengths of the two companies. Soben brings its expertise in commercial and cost analysis to help ensure the financial viability of sustainability initiatives. IES contributes its technical engine, to accurately model and simulates real-world assets.

“Our partnership with IES marks a significant milestone in our shared mission to make sustainability affordable,” said Pieter Schaap, Director at Soben. “We believe that sustainability should not be pursued blindly, but rather approached intelligently to ensure maximum impact with every investment made. By harnessing the power of our joint offering, we empower clients to embrace sustainability as a strategic advantage while achieving meaningful cost savings.”

“Decarbonisation is high on everyone’s agenda as ambitious net zero targets loom, but achieving this will be no easy feat. IES’s digital twin technology aids clients by setting out a clear path to net zero and, when combined with up-to-date cost data, organisations can ensure they are also optimising asset profitability too,” adds Don McLean, IES founder and CEO.

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Cype 2024, the latest release of the AEC focused design and analysis solution, has a major focus on sustainability with several new features and improved communication between its specialist solutions.

To help improve analyses relating to sustainability, Cype has enhanced its energy efficiency programs and improved the interconnection between them.

According to the developers, Cype offers specialists tools for carrying out real energy simulations, determining economic profitability, forecasting energy consumption and performance, and considering compliance with current codes – in new build or renovation projects.

Capabilities include energy simulation, acoustics, lighting, life cycle analysis, air conditioning, bills of quantities, solar panels, and charging points for electric vehicles.

With the new software professionals can perform energy audits of buildings, while estimating the energy demand and consumption of buildings under buildingSMART International standards.

Cype 2024 also allow users to design and analyse using systems and equipment for clean energy production such as solar thermal energy or solar PV energy, as well as others such as geothermal, aerothermal or biomass energy, etc.

For the design and analysis of photovoltaic systems, Cypelec PV Systems can be used to assess the number of solar panels that need to be installed in a building to achieve savings of between 50 and 70% of electricity costs.

The new release now includes new modelling elements, such as hybrid inverters, modular batteries and distribution panels.

Cypetherm EPlus, with the international EnergyPlus analysis engine, determines the energy demand of buildings, as well as the energy performance of air-conditioning systems, determining the energy consumption per supply system and energy vector used.

Meanwhile, for the French market, the Elodie by Cype program allows environmental impact assessments of buildings to be carried out.

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RIB Software has partnered with non-profit organisation, Building Transparency, to develop the RIB Carbon Quantifier.

Through a direct link with Building Transparency’s free to use Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), the application allows users to ‘quickly, easily and consistently’ allocate carbon environmental product declaration (EPD) values against their imported estimate data, including resource quantities.

This comes as studies highlight the industry’s impact on the environment, with construction constituting 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions and accounting for 36% of global energy demands.

René Wolf, Chief Executive Officer at RIB Software, says there is a growing need to reduce carbon emissions within the engineering and construction sector to combat the damaging effects of climate change.

“Until recently, the construction industry’s response to reducing building-related emissions has focused on energy efficiency by reducing operational emissions – the energy used to heat, cool and light buildings.

“While previously effective, this approach overlooks embodied carbon emissions associated with material and construction processes across a building’s lifecycle, which represents a quarter of the carbon emitted during the life of a building and 11% of all global carbon emissions.

“It is therefore critical to increase efforts to quantify, monitor, evaluate and ultimately reduce the embodied carbon emitted throughout the lifecycle of a construction project – and the driving factor for why RIB Software developed the Carbon Quantifier application,” explains Wolf.

Stacy Smedley, Executive Director of Building Transparency, says reducing embodied carbon emissions is one of the biggest opportunities in the fight against global warming. “Partnerships, like ours with RIB Software, are critical to driving action in the building sector and identifying new solutions that make it easier to prioritise low-carbon decision-making on projects. It’s exciting to have our EC3 data and its large carbon impact database be utilized and leveraged for tools like the RIB Carbon Quantifier.”

The primary features of the RIB Carbon Quantifier include the easy extraction of embodied carbon data from Building Transparency’s EC3 database against estimates; keeping a repository of each estimate’s embodied carbon data for cross-referencing and facilitating easier allocation of carbon values for future projects; the ability to easily export aligned quantified data back to EC3 for analytics, reporting and dashboarding; and providing users with a direct integration with other estimating products within the RIB portfolio of products.

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We all know BIM models have a tendency to get big, fast. The more detail that gets added, the slower manipulating the model becomes. There’s an argument that, for certain analyses and deeper insight into the performance of a building design, using something simultaneously more lightweight and more intelligent might be a better way to proceed.

Enter Topologic, a free, open-source tool that breaks down buildings into an external envelope and subdivisions of the enclosed space. Creating separate spaces and zones by using zero-thickness internal surfaces produces a model that is optimised for better understanding of building performance.

Topologic’s story starts with Dr Robert Aish, the ‘father’ of Bentley Systems Generative Components (GC) and Autodesk DesignScript. He was writing a paper on the application of non-manifold topology as a lightweight form for architectural modelling as far back as 2013.

Meanwhile, Dr Wassim Jabi of Cardiff University, who was researching parametric design thinking and its role in building performance simulation, took Aish’s research on board. Jabi applied the concept of non-manifold topology to his own design and energy performance simulation research, publishing papers on his findings in 2014 and 2015.

In 2015, Dr Jabi and Dr Aish (who at this time was visiting professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London) decided to collaborate. The goal of their research project was to investigate non-manifold topology further, by building a platform independent software library to be used with Grasshopper, Dynamo and Blender.

Their proposal was funded by a threeyear grant of over £300,000, awarded in 2016 by the Leverhulme Trust. In 2019, the first alpha version of Topologic was released. Once the project was complete, Aish left. Today, the code’s use in AEC practice is being championed and developed by Jabi.

Topologic is now an open-source software development kit and plug-in for visual data flow applications. Jabi claims it will assist architects in understanding their buildings from a holistic perspective — both as a physical assembly of components and as a logical, spatial and hierarchical system.

Topologic enables connections with analysis and simulation engines, such as EnergyPlus and OpenStudio and can be used to analyse the thermal performance of a building without the need for a huge and detailed BIM model. It can also be used to plot paths such as mapping fire egress routes, identifying the least disruptive route for a new service pipe, or computing the most congested location in a city layout.

Pretty much all BIM models are produced using walls, doors and windows – or in other words, building components. The reality is that, in analysis, models do not need this level of detail. What they do need is more knowledge of connections and interfaces. And while you will find plenty of adjacencies of spaces in a typical BIM model, the way they are modelled tends to create lapping co-linear lines between spaces and edges that don’t meet. The result can create issues for confused analysis tools. Topologic tries to close those loops.

“Topologic is used to basically model spaces, rather than actual elements,” Jabi explains. “We are replacing detailed geometry with smart topology and information, thus reducing a very heavy geometric model into lightweight geometry. We add smart, rigorous topology to designs, such as how things are connected, and then imbue it with a lot of additional information.”

That information is not just attributes, he continues. It can also travel with geometric operations or topological information. This makes a Topologic model extremely lightweight and extremely powerful.

“Topologic is based on the idea of nonmanifold topology, which allows you to model spaces and create internal subdivisions, like cells. If you can imagine a cube and if every point on the surface of that cube were sentient, they would see the world divided into two sets – the outside and the inside of the cube,” he says.

“Now imagine that condition being violated, where a point on the cube can actually see more than two sets. The outside can see other sets of points inside the cube. That situation is called non-manifold. So basically, when you have a geometric engine that supports non-manifold topology, you can have extremely powerful representations.”

A building, for example, can be seen as an outside envelope with interior cells. These interior cells can encompass other interior cells. Hierarchical embedding is possible, too. “Then you can start to think of your building, your design, as a set of interconnected entities, usually defined as space,” says Jabi.

Topologic can be used to analyse the thermal performance of a building without the need for a huge and detailed BIM model. It can also be used to plot paths such as mapping fire egress routes, identifying the least disruptive route for a new service pipe, or computing the most congested location in a city layout

Explaining the fundamental database underpinning Topologic, Jabi says: “Behind all of this is the idea of a ‘graph’. This is unlike BIM systems, as we don’t have to use ad hoc methods to add topological connections. As an example, a door in Revit should know what two rooms it separates, but that only happens in Revit if you checkmark it at a certain point. If you don’t do that checkmark, that door doesn’t know what rooms it separates. In Topologic, that is built into the DNA of the software — everything knows what it is connected to, and it’s automatic and part of the data structure.”

Obviously one of the key times in a project to do analysis and to make important decisions is at the concept phase. Here, the industry has seen many exciting applications come to market. Most of these tools are based on the concept of spaces that lie adjacent to one another, which is Topologic’s core starting point, too.

Jabi explained that synergies between products have already kickstarted some collaborative development work. Topologic, for example, has worked with Testfit, because there are compatibilities between the models that the two products create.

“Testfit creates these simple, blocky models, where everything is interconnected. Once we understood how their file format was organised, we created a reader for it, and we imported Testfit models into Topologic,” says Jabi.

“This meant we could analyse the heck out of them, as we understood exactly the walls that are between two units, the walls between the unit and the corridor, the walls between the unit, and the elevator shaft etcetera,” he says.

The Topologic team has also created rules for generating graphic models, producing Revit models via Dynamo, ready for design development. “We could identify external walls, internal walls etcetera, so we were able to apply the right thickness and materials. So Topologic can be used as a driver to ‘thicken’ into a BIM model.”

While products like Testfit can generate hundreds of models very quickly, the software has no understanding of whether designs are energy efficient or if they constitute ‘good’ architecture. Even though Topologic can help to enable analysis and drive them into Revit, we wondered if the process might go in the opposite direction, from Revit into Topologic for analysis?

“We have started with a BIM model, rather than create one from Topologic,” says Jabi. “We took a model of a building that was filled with rooms, but they were not connected into apartments. So it was impossible to get an idea of the rentable area and have data for analysis.”

By running the model through Topologic, a graph was created where all the ‘graph islands’ (apartments) could be identified. The graph immediately went back to Revit, with apartments correctly assigned and colour coded, and schedules needed for analysis were created.

“So we can import an unstructured BIM model, run it through Topologic’s intelligence and make it a little bit more structured,” says Jabi. “But, you know, bad modelling is not something we can magically solve in Topologic. What we are advocating is to start modelling in Topologic first, and then move to BIM. Don’t model in BIM and move back to Topologic — if anything, that is the worst case scenario. While we have to deal with it, obviously, that’s not what we recommend. Start building even in SketchUp, or Blender, or wherever you have lightweight things, and then imbue them with intelligence, imbue them with information, and do lots of analysis on those lightweight models. Once you’re done, and you know what you’re doing, it’s just a click away to go to Revit models, so that it becomes an output not an input for us.”

With the rise of open source, Topologic plays well with popular tools such as Blender BIM. Bruno Postle, a colleague of Jabi and a member of the OSArch community, has used Blender, Topologic and Blender BIM to create BIM models, for example.

The process starts in standard Blender, where the user makes a simple cube structure and adds in slice planes of zero thickness to form spaces. Then, with one click, this is sent to Topologic, which behind the scenes starts to create a building with all the topology and information needed. Based on Topologic’s output, the data can be thickened with IFC information for building an energy and structural model. These full IFC files can be imported into Blender BIM. If the model needs changing, you can go back to the simple model, drag edges and so on, and convert it one more time.

Conclusion

In many ways, Topologic reminds me of the finite element analysis (FEA) packages used in the mechanical CAD world. While product designers are modelling every component and part in an engine assembly, the analysis teams are not using these explicit 3D models, because FEA tools need simplified geometry and lots of data about forces, materials and temperatures. The core output is performance information, to find design flaws and limits to the performance envelope.

Topologic is a spatial representation, a framework where questions can be asked before detailed modelling continues. And, as is the case with all these rapid conceptual tools, which predominantly report back financial information, Topologic can quickly identify any financial downsides of rapid design suggestions. The fact it’s free also makes it excellent value! Sometimes, it pays to think in levels of abstraction.

The source code can be downloaded here.

Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2023 Edition of AEC Magazine

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Trimble has joined ResponsibleSteel, an independent, non-profit organisation designed to drive the socially and environmentally responsible production of net-zero steel, globally.

The steel industry is one of the largest industrial emitters of CO2. With owners and operators of both building and infrastructure assets increasingly expecting their construction partners to choose sustainably sourced materials, there is a growing opportunity and urgency for the steel industry to minimise its environmental impact

Trimble is the first BIM software technology provider to join the ResponsibleSteel initiative. The company’s Tekla software is used for the design, engineering, fabrication and detailing of steel structures.

Tekla’s Embodied Carbon Calculator enables designers and detailers to assess the potential environmental implications of designs to quickly compare various structural options’ carbon impact. Additionally, a plug-in to Tekla Structures enables the upload of material quantities in a design to One Click LCA, a lifecycle assessment software that helps users calculate and reduce the environmental impacts of their designs.

“Thanks to its industry-wide nature, ResponsibleSteel has the ability to bring about impactful change to the way steel is created, sold, sourced and applied,” said Päivi Puntila, director, business development and sustainability lead for the structures division at Trimble.

“As one of the key players in design software for steel structures, Trimble solutions have contributed to making construction more sustainable by raising efficiencies, helping avoid waste during construction and enabling data reporting on the climate impact of projects.

“Our membership of ResponsibleSteel is further proof of our commitment to helping protect and build a better world to drive a sustainable future.”

Annie Heaton, ResponsibleSteel’s CEO, said, “As the only global multi-stakeholder initiative for the responsible production of steel, we have created a platform where companies from across the steel value chain can come together to learn and work together to shape the future of the industry.

“Buildings and construction make up around 39 percent of global carbon emissions, 11 percent of which is from construction and the manufacture of building materials such as steel. Tekla software allows engineers to measure and compare the carbon footprint of different structural designs, helping to reduce their environmental impact.”

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Symetri, a provider of solutions for design, engineering, construction and manufacturing firms, has formed a new partnership with One Click LCA, a developer of construction Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) software.

In addition to a global technology reseller agreement, the agreement includes a technology partnership which allows Symetri to use One Click LCA’s database as part of Symetri Technology.

According to Mikko Viertola, CTO, Symetri Group, the aim is to enable Symetri’s customers to make carbon-smart material selections for both buildings and building products.

Building LCA (Lifecycle Assessment) is a science-based methodology for quantifying the lifetime environmental impacts of a building. One Click LCA has been designed to make the assessment easy by embedding the methodology into a tool.

According to Symetri, the software helps to measure and reduce the environmental impacts of buildings, achieve green building certifications, and comply with regulations that are a mandatory part of planning in many countries.

The environmental targets of the construction industry also extend to the products used to build. Thus, manufacturers have begun to meet the increasing need to produce Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) to reliably quantify and communicate the lifetime environmental impact of a product.

Symetri explains that One Click LCA’s Product LCA and EPD solution provides manufacturers with an easy solution to produce 3rd party verified EPDs based on European and international Standards.

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