University's Digital Fabrication Lab Develops New Solar Panel Structures

The Digital Fabrication Laboratory is a component of the Georgia Tech's Digital Building Laboratory, and it focuses on manufacturing, fabrication, prototyping, and construction – along with the subsequent testing and analysis of fabricated assemblies and materials. The Digital Fabrication Laboratory supports the Digital Building Laboratory by demonstrating building product and process innovation growing out of new practices, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), on-site construction automation, and lean construction methods. In this video, assistant professor Tristan Al-Haddad describes how the huge, industrial-enabled CNC design lab allows students to test their creative ideas. In a project funded by the Department of Energy, the lab is finishing up the development of new structures for solar panels that are much lighter, cheaper, and easier to install than existing panels.

Transcript

00:00:00 It's one of the most unique labs in the United States, really in the world. It's, so far as I know, it's the largest industrial-enabled CNC design lab. Right? Not in the mechanical engineering department, not in an aerospace department, but in an architecture and industrial design department. And what it does is it gives us an opportunity to allow students to really test ideas. That's the most important thing. So, what design students, be it architecture, industrial design, uh, what they're constantly doing is this sort of wonderful creative work where they're coming up with new ideas, they're making drawings and representations of those ideas. But they don't really get to test the validity of those ideas. A scientist would write an hypothesis and then do ten experiments, right? Take the results, codify those results, publish those results. And we're able to do something very similar in the design and construction

00:00:51 industry. So, a design student can have an idea and can actually test that idea through material making. And one project that we're, we're sort of wrapping up right now which I think is a great example of that is the Simple Boss project. This is a GTRI project, um. It's a very large Department of Energy-funded project where this lab has served as a fundamental infrastructure for the creative work that has happened in the project. And our charge was to develop new structures for, uh, for solar panels that are much cheaper, much lighter, much faster to install, in order to change the game and that entire project could not have happened without this lab as a physical and intellectual space for all those people to come together, to develop new ideas, and to test new ideas.