Parametric Layouts for Controlled Environment Agriculture

This project was part of an effort to develop parametric tools to dynamically reconfigure floor plans and growing equipment layouts in controlled environment agriculture facilities, specifically hydroponic vertical farms. These tools were intended to reduce the time spent on configuring layouts with repetitive elements by automating the process with parametric scripting. This way design teams could optimize their time and quickly test the efficiently of several parametrically generated configurations to determine the best layout rather than spend a significant amount of time developing one layout at a time. The tools developed for this project automatically adjust the growing space and equipment based on the footprint of the space and a set of input parameters which designate what kind of crops need to be grown and the ideal yield of each crop.

 The scripts developed for this project were written with Grasshopper in Rhino 7 with some custom coded Python nodes. The user of these tools can control various input parameters with sliders inside Grasshopper.

Dynamic Layouts

This example depicts a hypothetical project where a vertical farm would be located in the central core of a building with the growing space rotated approximately 30 degrees in accordance with other design parameters. The footprint of the building is easily adjusted by the modeler by simply moving the control points of the building's outline. If the outline changes, the script automatically reconfigures the growing space and equipment within the newly updated space parameters. The script ensures the growing area and support spaces maintains a minimum square footage and ensures those spaces do not exceed a given percentage of the overall floor plate. The growing racks and equipment are reconfigures to meet spacing parameters that ensure their optimal functionality. With each reconfiguration, the amount of water and electricity needed to irrigate crops and power growing lights is recalculated and Irrigation pipes and electricidal conduit is dynamically resized to meet these parameters.

Dynamic Structural Grids

Structural components such as columns, beams and other elements are also dynamically adjusted based on site parameters. Here, this example shows a  warehouse type scenario where a farm would be located inside an orthogonal, single level facility with support spaces represented by the grey intersecting box. As the location of the support spaces changes, the structural grid dynamically adjusts and reconfigures itself to the parameters of the space. The column spacing is set to meet a set of criteria such as minimum and maximum spacing between growing racks, dimensions of walkways, fire egress and other parameters, which can all be manually adjusted by the modeler.