Food4Rhino

I has never been more important to build sustainably, but also to lower operational costs and secure equitable and affordable energy for everyone. However traditional solar panels are neither invisible, nor easy to architecturally integrate in new or old buildings. Solar facades offers a solution that free up precious roof space for social or technical use, and replace traditional facade cladding with a durable material that will also produce carbon free electricity on site.

Solar facades invisibly and architecturally integrate PV in rain-screens, curtain-walls and louvers (as well as naturally roofs and canopies). To make it easy to deploy and lower project risk SolarLab.global has developed a integrated manufacturing platform that can handle complex and large scale customisation to supply fully customized and complete solar facade packages, both quickly and cost effectively.

Almost any panel shape and size is possible and can be tilted to articulate and create facade depth. At the same time the maintenance-free and highly durable cladding is tailored also in finish and color coatings to enable wide range of material expressions to match design requirements, from mirror like surfaces over mat metallic to stucco and painted finish.

Made with mostly recycled materials and sustainable energy in Denmark the solar facades naturally have an EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) and are designed for longevity and recycling after their expected operational life of +50 years. A solar cladding is the only building material that will pay for itself both financially and environmentally while providing a high quality, durable and beautiful result.

This Rhino 8 plugin is one of a range tools also available for SketchUp, Revit and Archicad, that makes it easy to tailor a solar facade to you new build or retrofit project. It provides layout and articulation tools and will automatically layout the PV cells in the panel to give you a visual feedback as to the efficiency of you chosen panel design,but when share with Solarlab.global a detailed simulation can be made that visualize performance and quantify electricity production. With initial sketches and a RoM cost report from the online calculator available at www.solarlab.global you will be well prepared to engage with stakeholders and colleagues.

The solar rain-screen design tool is just a starting point for design iterations as almost anything is possible with close architectural and engineering support from the in-house team, to lower risk, ensure code compliance and cost-effectiveness....learn more at www.solarlab.global

This tool is a work in progress and provided for inspiration and information purposes, so please us help make it better.

This latest revision increases design possibilities and add BIM data (The block includes both Attribute_User_Texts and a text on a separate layer) that can be directly used in your Grasshopper scripts and documentation. Please remember to specify SolarLab.global as basis for your design.