Fun project - curved roof, curved building.

[jamesbm]

As it's Friday I thought it would be nice to share an interesting PVSOL challenge and 2 solutions.

I am working on a curved building with a curved roof.

 

solution 1: modelled in SketchUp with measured flat sections on roof to place panels - this looks pretty but took ages to get curved roof to meet curved walls.

Solution 2: built in PVSOL 3D design, multiple 2m wide single pitch buildings (lots of trigonometry) - this will be more flexible for small adjustments in roof pitch.

[developer_mm]

Wow, nice project. But I guess both projects took a while to create.

[jamesbm]

Yes! About 4 hours on the SketchUp imported version and 2 hours on the PVSOL only version. The PVSOL version I spent more time working out the height of each building in Excel than building it.  

[jamesbm]

Just to finish this off - the project is now complete.

Drone image courtesy of Perfect Sense Energy.

What a beauty!

[Etinergy]

@jamesbm Please how did you curve the roofs on PVSOL

[jamesbm]

@Etinergy

You can't do a genuinely curved roof in PV*SOL. You need to have multiple buildings with a single pitched roof.

The other way is to model it in Sketchup then import it. If you are using Sketchup I would suggest you flatten sections with the width of 1 or 2 panels. If you import a curved roof I think PV*SOL will approximate it with multiple flat sections but you will end up with gaps between panels.

It is quite hard work but you end up with something quite impressive.

 

Good luck.

     

[ghassan.allow]

Hi

Nice project and great what you did.

Now I am facing almost same challenge and don't know how to make the 3d building at pvsol , need some advice and more information how to do that , as will what calculation need to do at excel ...

[Heymo]

On 2/11/2019 at 1:28 PM, jamesbm said:

Yes! About 4 hours on the SketchUp imported version and 2 hours on the PVSOL only version. The PVSOL version I spent more time working out the height of each building in Excel than building it.  

Hello and thanks in advance for the Excel idea. I applied it in a project I am developing in a hangar type building and it worked well. Basically it is about making building pieces (volumes) for which the geometry has been previously calculated (height and width, the length is known). Then the building has to be "assembled" from these pieces. It is not very complicated.