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architecture, Engineering & Construction

Design comfortable spaces faster with more confidence

SimScale enables rapid feedback on indoor and outdoor comfort, in a simple-to-use platform from within your browser. This can be used even at early stages to inform design, reduce cost, and ensure our cities remain comfortable and safe.

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Why Cloud-based Simulations for the AEC Industry?

SimScale provides high-fidelity design simulation tools for building physics, urban design, and sustainability that are both technically and economically accessible for designers and engineers, at any scale, in the cloud.

Our innovative cloud-native simulation platform lets you explore, design, and optimize your project ideas and solutions through the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), heat transfer, and structural dynamics analysis. The advanced physics solvers allow designers and engineers to evaluate & optimize building thermal performance, indoor air quality, indoor and outdoor thermal comfort, wind loading, and wind comfort.

By deploying simulation early in the design process, architects and engineers can ensure they meet and exceed their design briefs, be it for energy, sustainability, or comfort performance. Simulation provides detailed insights into building performance, allowing designers to identify design strengths and weaknesses in a virtual prototype, avoiding costly re-engineering later in the design stage. Furthermore, the resultant time & cost savings from simulating early and often allows architects and engineers to explore more of their ideas, using the parametric capabilities in SimScale and integrations with third-party CAD and analysis packages.

Design of the new OPPO headquarters in China by Zaha Hadid Architects.

External AEC

  • Pedestrian wind comfort & compliance 
  • Building aerodynamics
  • Wind loading & facade pressures
  • Outdoor thermal comfort & heat island reduction

Internal AEC

  • Thermal comfort
  • Indoor air quality
  • Ventilation
  • Building envelope & thermal bridging 
  • Solar shading & radiation
  • Data center design

Sustainability

  • Sustainable & NetZero building design
  • Building Information Modeling (BIM)
  • AWS Cloud Sustainability powers SimScale and is 3.6x more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers.

How can SimScale solve your greatest design challenge?

Request Demo

Features and Benefits 

cloud native parametrization

Cloud-Native Parameterization

Enables multiple design CAD geometries simulated in parallel with robust CAD handling and automatic meshing. Multi-directional wind analysis for wind comfort studies simulated in parallel e.g. up to 36 wind directions are simulated simultaneously saving time and cost.

Solver Speed & Accuracy

SimScale meets and in many cases exceeds the accuracy of traditional CAE simulation tools (speed does not compromise accuracy). 

  • Advanced analysis capabilities using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) pacefish® solver increased simulation times by an order of magnitude with robust meshing and is up to 10x faster than competing tools. 
  • Rapid transient simulations: Transient analysis using LBM is a must-have for AEC simulations due to the complex nature of turbulent flows in urban environments and the unsteady atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) profile needed to validate simulations against tried and tested wind tunnel methods.
aec solver speed
aec ease of use

Ease-of-use

SimScale takes away the complexity of preparing imported geometry and allows designers to focus on analysis by providing an intuitive, automated, and robust UI that reduces person-hours required for simulation, and also makes it accessible to non-experts/designers.

  • Easy CAD import
  • Auto meshing and manual refinement where needed
  • A guided workflow for simulation setup
  • Hundreds of ready-made templates to choose from
  • Automatic results post-processing and image generation for wind comfort for example.

API Integration & Automation

The SimScale API facilitates bi-directional coupling with many popular CAE and design optimization tools, including Rhino®, Ladybug®, Onshape®, Grasshopper®, ESRIArcGIS, Sketchup®, and more, allowing customization and app development by architects and engineers or third-party developers. The API is accessible using a Python SDK, already popular in the AEC industry.

aec api and automation
Common file formats and CAD tools which integrate and import directly into the SimScale platform for faster CAD cleanup and geometry preparation

CAD Interoperability

SimScale can import various file formats making it easy for architects and engineers to work with their preferred CAD authoring tools including; Rhino®, Grasshopper, Revit®, AutoCAD®, Sketchup, and Onshape as well as importing common file formats such as STL, DWG, IGES, and more. CAD mode is a dedicated environment to interact with your CAD model, delete, extrude, or scale CAD parts, and perform CAD-related operations directly within the platform.

Datasheets

Architecture, Engineering, and Construction— Urban Microclimate

Learn how architects and engineers can leverage SimScale to evaluate building aerodynamics, pedestrian wind comfort, outdoor thermal comfort, and structural wind loading on buildings and entire cities.

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Architecture, Engineering, and Construction — Indoor Environment

Learn how architects and engineers can leverage SimScale to quickly predict and assess air movement, air quality, HVAC sizing, thermal comfort, and ventilation strategies in indoor environments.

simscale indoor environment datasheet thumbnail

What our Customers say

  • ZHA-logo-368x227

    “If there is an architect that comes to you with a geometry in the morning, you can get the building ready for simulation in one or two hours, get the results after lunch and have time to go through a process of changes, according to the results. So in one day, we are able to optimize. The results we get from SimScale help us quickly understand how a building is going to behave and what kind of impact the building geometry will have on the surrounding space.”

    Carlos Bausa Martinez, Sustainability Team Lead

    Zaha Hadid Architects

  • adrian-smith-gordon-gill-architecture

    “When we began using SimScale, we were able to shorten our CFD simulation feedback loop, which in turn allowed us to iterate and evaluate many design options at the earliest design phases of our projects. This proved to be particularly innovative because design changes during this time have the potential for the biggest impact on performance. The more our design team can test and make decisions based on these simulations directly translates to more confidence in meeting the project’s performance goals as well as desired design outcomes.”

    Anthony Viola AIA, Architect

    Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

  • thornton tomasetti api case study 368x345

    “The digital wind tunnel app created by the CORE Studio Group is a CFD app using wind simulations for urban developments and looking particularly at PWC, structural wind loading, facade pressures, and integrating these analysis types into our digital design workflows. The app is really for the larger pool of engineers who might not be CFD experts but can run a quick simulation without leaving the rhino design environment.”

    Jeroen Janssen, Associate Director

    Thornton Tomasetti

  • silent aire logo

    “A typical development process before Silent-Aire embedded simulation in their workflow would have included building an initial test unit with a 4-6 week pre-testing phase and 85 engineering man-hours needed to test/optimize the design. Using SimScale this same process now takes 2-3 weeks of pre-testing and only 40 engineering man-hours. Using simulation, Silent-Aire has cut their product development and testing time and cost down by half (50%) on recent projects.”

    Shane McConn, Lead Mechanical Design Engineer

    Silent-Aire

  • smartlouvre case study with simscale aec

    “Smartlouvre decided to recruit the expertise of SimScale GmbH because SimScale recognized the unique nature of the product and the fact that its performance was complex and challenging to simulate. SimScale’s expertise in the architecture, engineering, and construction sector meant they had a clear appreciation of all the challenges with simulating MicroLouvre performance criteria.”

    Andrew Cooper, Managing Director

    Smartlouvre

Customer Success

KPF Develops Rhino App for Early-Stage Design Using SimScale

KPF used the SimScale API to develop an in-house Rhino app that uses the wind modeling engine in SimScale. They developed the microclimate app in less than 3 months and deployed it to over 100 architects globally.

kpf develops rhino app in 3 months and deploys to 100 architects

Further Reading