by Chin Kee Ting (1002989) and Megan Chor (1003871)
Presentation
From our midterm presentations, we have broadened our focus to tackle the aspect of healing alongside our more preventive strategies we were aiming to realize with our design. Looking at out improved problem scope, we now aim to design a new typology of sub-acute care facility with added focus on the benefits of nature, social interaction and home-like designs in healing and improving mental wellness.
Our problem scope and design directions are visualized in out contextual collage.
Structurally, we decided to brainstorm ‘ tactics’ that utilizes our inflated arch and pod system to control air pressure and hence ventilation speed that sees different targets throughout the day, year and unforeseen circumstances. These tactics are:
- The arch shelter and pod system and their relative placement from each each other that creates ‘tighter’ high ventilation spaces and voluminous lower ventilation spaces. These pods will move according to the ventilation demands of the space and a certain period.
- Mechanically controlled roof openings that serve to release pressure within the shelter to lower ventilation
- *The agglomeration of multiple shelter systems that copes with fluctuating demands of recuperation and patient holding spaces that may result from unforeseen circumstances.
These tactics are visualized in our transformation diagram.
Transformation diagram
Contextual collage
To test our hypothesis on the effectiveness of these tactics, we used ANSYS to monitor pressure and wind velocity changes.
We studied:
- The presence of roof opening: The presence of openings resulted in lower pressure and hence higher wind speed in zones after the opening.
2. Aligned pods vs. dispersed pods: Pods that were positioned to guide the flow of prevailing winds resulted in more even distribution, less vortexes and higher winds exiting the shelter.
Feeback
- Consider the needs of these spaces during additional events like mass casualty events, period of haze and during pandemics. All of which require different movements of air. During haze, air may need to be completely mechanically ventilated whereas during a pandemic, pods need to be negatively pressured for air to enter but not exit to infect the non infected. (Single pass air, only used once and disposed)
- Consider a system of how our pod and shelter double skin membrane can bring about various changes in air flow and subsequently how it can be applied to different scenarios where air needs to behave differently. (Diagrammatize this in the transformation diagram)
- Consider the programs in the space and their various requirements of size, logistics and flow alongside other programs.
Goals for the next 2 weeks
ANSYS:
- Test the flow of air within the agglomeration of shelter type A (End openings) and shelter type B (Side openings). With two types of shelters, there is now greater flexibility in configuration and expansion.
- Test the effect of more aerodynamic pods
- Test the effects of the rotation of positioning of these pods to slow/ speed up wind.
Production:
- Rationalize and diagrammatize a flow of programs
- Re design transformation diagram to include diagrams of the system’s deployability and tactics at play.
- Source of a suitable plastic materials that can be flexible enough to inflate without much creasing.