Energy-efficient design
Designing energy-efficient buildings can be challenging: Incorporating features that decrease the energy needed to run them often increases the energy-intensive materials required to build them, and vice versa. Now an MIT team has demonstrated a computer simulation that can help architects optimize their designs for both future operational energy and the initial energy required for making structural materials — at the same time. The technique rapidly generates a set of designs that offer the best compromises between those two critical energy components. The architect can then make a choice based on quantitative information as well as aesthetic preference. The demonstration produced some striking results. In one case, choosing a design that was slightly less efficient in operational energy cut energy for structural materials in half — an opportunity that would have gone undetected using a simulation that optimized operational energy alone. In recent years, concerns about global warming and greenhouse gas emissions...