Solar Path Building Design Simulation
Before the days of modern, inexpensive, 3D computer graphics, a heliodon (precisely-movable light source) was used to show the angle of the sun on a physical model of a proposed building. Today, mathematical computer models calculate location-specific solar gain (shading) and seasonal thermal performance, with the ability to rotate and animate a 3D color graphic model of a proposed building design.
Passive solar building design heating and cooling issues can be counterintuitive (like roof-angled glass). Precise performance calculations and simulations are essential to help avoid reinventing the wheel and duplicating previously-made expensive experimental construction errors (like a summer solar furnace).
Read more about this topic: Sun Path
Famous quotes containing the words solar, path, building, design and/or simulation:
“Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Old and fat, I waddle, gasping, up the beckoning path of lust.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey’s fits and starts, rehearses life’s own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)