BamCore Showcases Its Carbon Impacts Via Autodesk Ecosystem

LUC WING: Welcome, everyone. We're excited that you're here with us today to discuss BamCore's mission and journey with you all. But first, I'll go ahead and just show a quick overview of what we're going to go ahead and get into this afternoon.

We'll start the session off with quick and painless introductions of ourselves and then our organizations. And then we'll learn more about BamCore and their mission. And after that, we'll get into how we provide solutions for them to showcase their true impact and value to their clients. And hopefully, we'll leave enough room at the time for some questions.

So without further delay, I'll go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Luc Wing. I'm a Performance and Innovation Lead with Microdesk, and I work with the Co-Innovation Lab as our global research and development group. I'm a sustainability and innovation believer, and I've been building performance analysis certified through Autodesk, as well as Revit.

And I've been speaking here at Autodesk University since 2015, and I've actually had the privilege of, last year, speaking at London Build. My background was in architecture and helping firms adopt sustainable practices. But recently, I've reached out to all the trades, understanding that we can only achieve our net-zero goals if we work together.

So the quote on the right-hand side of the screen-- it really resonates with me, and I wanted to share it with you all. And it says, "Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word 'success.'" And I truly believe that BamCore and their mission is doing just that. And we're redefining what it means to be a successful project. So now, go ahead and pass it over to my partner and BamCore representative, Hazem.

HAZEM KAHLA: Hello, everyone. This Hazem Kahla. I have studied architecture engineering, but since my graduation, I have been focusing on the BIM and VDC industry. I have several BIM experience with contractors and designers. I have supported executing the BIM for megaprojects in the United States and internationally. I was the automation guy for different design platforms and have developed many tools to support the AEC industry. But since I joined BamCore, I see myself as a sustainable advocate, and now I'm working as a VDC manager at BamCore.

At BamCore, we are using biogenic fibers and industrialized construction to deliver efficient decarbonization of the build environment. Each house we build helps the climate cleanup, as for the building material, the construction system, time, and labor. That's why we can say it is the best way to build.

LUC WING: And so just a quick introduction to Microdesk-- we've been around for over 27 years, and we've been supporting the AEC industry, adopting the right solutions. And, as of just recent, Symetri, one of Europe's leaders in the BIM consulting and under the Addnode Group, and Microdesk have now partnered up, and we're expanding our capabilities and resources become a global team.

And, come January 1, we will officially be known as Symetri. This partnership is the beginning of many great things to come. But, for today, this content that we prepared for you guys was developed by our Co-Innovation Lab.

Our Co-Innovation Lab is driven by a formula of co-research and co-creation, the aim being to develop innovative solutions that present value that is impactful. Our lab is an industry thought leader we are driving growth for our clients and the industry. The Co-Innovation Lab drives R&D by understanding global trends, society needs, and policies, where we then can develop business strategies and frameworks that truly invest and foster innovation.

But before we dive into the meat of today's session, I'm going to pause and just take a quick moment to thank our partners at the Autodesk Foundation, for without whom none of this would be possible. And if you all do not know, the Autodesk Foundation is a nonprofit supporting nonprofits, delivering impact and driving change around the globe with above-and-beyond support.

Working with the Autodesk Foundation and their organizations they connect us with, such as BamCore, is truly an honor, and it makes work exciting, fun, and fulfilling. And I believe I speak for everyone today when I say, we are passionate about making a difference. So I love to give a huge shout-out to Bobby, Chelsea, and [? Damiana, ?] plus the many, many more folks over there who support these engagements and really make a difference in the world.

So now, I'm going to pass it back over to my colleague, and he'll tell us about what they do over at BamCore and how they believe in changing the globe. And trust me, it's nothing short of amazing and inspiring, to say the least. All yours, Hazem.

HAZEM KAHLA: Thanks, Luc. Today, we have three messages to talk about. First is how we use the computer design to construct our projects in a very efficient way. Second is the benefit of using sustainable materials in construction. And last, the tool we developed with Microdesk to calculate the carbon impact at an early stage of the construction.

At BamCore, we are using bamboo as the main building material. Our houses are built out of bamboo. What people think when we talk about the bamboo house is the picture to the left. But, surprise, the picture to the right is also a bamboo house. Actually, the entire neighborhood is built out of bamboo. As most of you might be wondering now, how do we do that? So let's go over a quick overview of what we do at BamCore.

Bamboo is harvested sustainably and processed to be part of our structural panels. These load-bearing panels are then used to build BamCore's prime wall, which has the thermal and acoustical benefits that we we'll cover later in this presentation, all while reducing time, labor, and cost on the job site.

The panels are fabricated in our plant, using specially developed computer-driven machinery and cutting-edge CAD/CAM workflows and processes. This brings the benefit of automation to the construction cycle to reduce the need for hard-to-find skilled labor on the jobsite. The panels have any needed instruction printed directly on the surfaces, including sequential numbering, color-coded nail patterns, and locations for MEP elements that will need to be installed in the wall cavities.

The panels are easily assembled on site into the prefabricated wall packages that were created to the specifications of our customers design teams. The house will be quickly assembled as legal. Even the nails' location are printed on the top of the panel surfaces.

Our jobsite application, built on the Autodesk Forge platform and with the help from the Microdesk support team, brings the benefits of BIM straight into the field. The app includes all the necessary data from the BIM model for the contractor, even a 3D step-by-step animation of the panel installation sequence.

At BamCore, we are working on a sustainable solution that removes the barriers to adoption. It's cost, time, and labor. A recent analysis with a townhouse customer showed that they are saving around $5,000 per unit for construction. It's also way more than that for the long run, when the operating costs get considered.

As for the time, it's cut in half or even more. Based on the comparison on what's replaced in the conventional structural processes, we have implemented the computer design to the fabrication stage. So everything is coordinated, and the building is easy to be assembled. As for the labor, there is no special training required. There is no special equipment required. The labor requirements are significantly reduced. There is visual instructions printed on the panels that aids the installation for the different trades.

Some of you might be wondering now, why bamboo? Actually, we could just talk quickly about four things. First, it's faster. When we say faster, bamboo is the fastest-growing plant on Earth. It could grow more than one foot per day but also could be harvested every year without killing the plant, not like the wood we get from the trees.

Then we could say it's stronger. With the panel structure we have developed, it's a stronger than conventional stick-framed construction. The panel became structural, and it's not depending on the framing alone to carry the load. In this video, we have tested firing a 2-by-4 stud from a cannon at the speed of 50 miles per hour on both walls. You see the standard. It never resisted. It just went to through it. But our wall, it just came back.

For the thermal, we are eliminating 80% to 90% of the framing, which also eliminates the thermal bridging that the framing creates in the wall cavity, which means more continuous space in the cavity for the insulation. As for the quieter, our panels' assemblies have a better acoustic insulation compared to the conventional wood framing walls, and that's thanks-- for that, it's thanks to the insulation and for the larger space in the cavity and for the whole structure.

So a lot of what we have talked about so far are the benefits that BamCore brings to the jobsite and to the building owners in terms of lowering their operation costs, operating costs, and providing better building environment. And now we are going to switch to the benefits of BamCore, to the benefits that BamCore brings to the planet by capturing carbon in the building as embodied carbon.

So we did a study of different wood and bamboo species to see the amount of carbon absorbed during the life cycle of the plant. We checked Douglas fir, loblolly, B. bambos, Guadua, and D. asper. The results varied as the following graphs. The graph shows the results for a study on 1 hectare of the forest. Here, we are showing the results for a forest of Douglas fir.

We started presuming that we have a mature forest ready to be harvested. When the forest get harvested, the plant get killed, and there is what we call a carbon emission event, which is about 150 metric tons of carbon emitted in the air, and that's what we see it here in these areas because there is that drop in the amount of carbon sequestered.

Then we plant the forest again, and we will wait another 45 years, which is the life cycle of the plant. It's about 45 years here. After we weigh that, and after the plant become mature and ready to get harvested, during that time, the tree will sequestrate about 200 metric tons of carbon. But, unfortunately, most of that will get wasted when we harvest the forest again due to the carbon emission event.

As a climate cleanup act, we have sequestered less than 200 metric tons of carbon at any time during the lifecycle of the forest. Here, we have tested another plant, which is the loblolly. It has shortened life cycle, which is 25 years. It has less impact for the carbon emission event. But at the end, it's not doing that much difference.

Then we move to the bamboo, and here comes the first one, the Guadua. When bamboo gets harvested, it does not kill the plant, so the plant will continue to grow and to sequester its carbon. So we don't see that drop over the life cycle of the plant. Then we tested another species of bamboo, which is the D. asper. It has better results for the carbon sequestered over the lifetime.

Then, lastly, the B. bambos-- it has way more better impact for the carbon sequestered. And here, we see that all of the normal trees are ranging around 0 for the total carbon sequestered during the life cycle of that plant. But for the bamboo species, it's always growing, and it's always sequestering more and more carbon. That's why we call bamboo carbon sequestration engine.

Taking our point of time and looking ahead, the important thing is that we remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We have just shown with that study and that graph that bamboo is doing it way faster and way more efficiently than wood. So any carbon credit comes from our use of bamboo, and building materials should be valued higher than the carbon credit coming from our use of wood.

So when we say carbon credit, we mean the reward we get from the carbon credit organizations. These organizations get the fund from the companies who are exceeding the limit of CO2 emissions. It's necessary for these companies to buy carbon credit for the extra amount of CO2 released from the companies who are pulling it out from the atmosphere.

And after we saw that, we came up with some technical difficulties. So we checked with our friends at Microdesk. We showed them what we have. We wanted a clear way to communicate the value of bamboo walls.

Then we needed a way to quantify and visualize impacts of BamCore's system versus traditional systems. That's for the energy impact and for the operating carbon and also for the energy impact, which is the operating carbon, and for the material impact, which is the embodied carbon. And then we want to engage with the clients in a digestible single platform. I will leave the mic with Luc to talk about their solution.

LUC WING: Thank you. So, as Hazem said, we needed to address these problems, and we needed to come up with solutions in order to make them practical and applicable for BamCore core and to showcase these solutions to the clients. So, first step, we decided to develop a quick, accurate energy-modeling process. And for this, we needed the customized insight to add BamCore's wall types with all their unique properties.

Next was to develop a workflow with methods and procedure guides for benchmarking predictive embodied carbon during the conceptual stages. And finally, we had to do all this and convey this information and convey the impact and value to the client in a digestible, easy-to-understand format.

So first, we started it, and we conducted a discovery workshop. During this time, we worked with BamCore to review and decipher all their content, libraries, and templates and past projects that we engaged with them on. We did this to understand how they worked and delivered the projects. Thankfully, we did this because out-of-the-box workflows just would not have cut it for this unique engagement.

However, after this, we were able to develop a simple process, a set of simple workflows to achieve their end goal. And we felt this would enable BamCore to adopt these processes with higher success rates and limiting hiccups and knowledge loss. So we delivered strategies and support guides, or how-to manuals, if you will, for each of the steps you see here, on how to repeat this process and ensuring consistency and accuracy, and eventually helping BamCore help clients achieve their net-zero aspirations.

So we decided to approach this implementation strategically and in bite sizes. Our first tackle was energy modeling. When I first met with BamCore through the Autodesk Foundation, I was originally brought in just to discuss Insight. And Insight-- it's a fantastic tool for energy modeling, one, because it's free and available to anyone with Revit, and two, because it's fast and accurate.

You don't need much input, if any, really, to have accurate results, due to the algorithms running Insight calculations. And it runs through all the verified energy simulation engines approved for all the government agencies, including EnergyPlus, and is compliant with DOE-2.2. So for all these reasons, I was quickly able to see value that Insight could bring and how it could support BamCore in showcasing to their clients the value of operational carbon. Next slide, please. Sorry.

So there were some key areas and issues that we had to address in order to make this process robust enough to showcase the true impact. The first hurdle was the model condition. And, as you can see here, BamCore typically receives models that are very early in the design process and typically leave a lot up to your imagination. And they really don't capture everything that's needed or anything for a proper analysis.

We proposed a process and documentation and workflow guidelines so no matter what condition the model was received in, BamCore had a fast and efficient way to get an accurate EUI, which led us to our next issue. When using Insight, you typically suggest to use the schematic overrides and select our values that correlate with our values specced for the project. As you know, systems usually don't align 100% to the systems proposed, and this throws people off just a little bit, even though our values are the same.

So, with this, I learned so much about working with BamCore products during this engagement. And their high-performing walls really confronted us with some very unique challenges. So let's look at what made this a little bit more complex than simply just using those schematic overrides to match our values. BamCore offers walls at 5-and-1/2, 7-and-1/4, 9-and-1/4, and 11-and-1/4-inch widths. All of these have two insulation types-- fiberglass and cellulose.

The part that made this even more tricky was each of those came in four different options for framing factors-- 9.78%, 6.65%, and 5.61%, and an outstanding 3.28%. So with traditional Insight workloads, this would have sunk our hopes right there. And going through the schematic type overrides would no longer work, considering the complexity of these BamCore systems. And, simply, there's not an assembly like it on the market.

But being creative, we found a solution. Knowing that when you utilize detailed elements in your constructions, and they're converted over to the gbXML, we could utilize this information if we could just locate where that data was coming from. That data that supports these energy settings database-- [CLEARS THROAT] hint, hint-- and after locating that constructions file, we are now able to select specific wall types with tested and validated data from BamCore into Insight.

So, once we were able to get the custom assemblies into Insight, we needed to study all the iterations. Insight allowed us to make and study multiple iterations of our model at once, helping us showcase the impacts and value of different wall types into the energy modeling platform. Then we were able to set scenarios in the Insight and ensure that we are comparing apples to apples for all the models, the only difference being the wall types.

This information is displayed in Insight, and it's very well put together. But as you know, sending an Insight link to a client may not be the best way to communicate the impact of these factors. Some may export all this data into images and develop their own deliverables to tell a story, which is what most people do for the control factor, and it's the best way to communicate with some owners.

However, BamCore wanted to again push the envelope and take it to another level and showcase the embodied carbon along with this. So we took the next step to begin to understand how we can now tackle embodied carbon. And again, the needs here were very similar. We needed a way to grow or a way to showcase embodied carbon in a clear, digestible manner.

So first, we took all of BamCore's wall types again, and we took two more wall types that they typically see specified on projects, like the IBC standard R-13 and the California Standard Title 24 R-20 assembly. And we benchmarked these assemblies for embodied carbon at every 100 square feet. We have now coined this term in this process as the pACI. That's the Predicted Assembly Carbon Index for short.

Using this index, we're able to write carbon calculations and embed these numbers into schedulable parameters that it allows BamCore to rapidly understand the carbon impacts from its assemblies live as they model. And these formulas from our pACI have enabled us to view the predicted carbon of a project even when using generic wall types. So, as our models, we can see what embodied carbon would be if we were using any of the BamCore walls or versus any of the typical stick-construction assemblies. Next, please.

So as, you can see, as you model and develop the building, you can then check the different types of impacts and all the different wall systems above. With a generic wall type of 6-inch generic wall, I wrote out the word BamCore, and I can see the impacts of the embodied carbon for all of their wall assemblies, including the typical stick constructions.

So let's go ahead and take a quick look on how we can put this all together. When we were meeting with BamCore in the beginning to envision what this could look like, we had no idea what the impacts could be, and so we developed this concept sketch. We wanted to show the benefits that Insight analysis provided side by side with the carbon impacts of the project BamCore proposed assemblies.

First, the traditional stick assemblies and construction-- so this would allow the owner to visualize the project and the impacts and for these crucial decisions and how they can be made. So let's take a quick look at where the app is currently at. And just to let you know, we're still going through some revisions to enhance BamCore's experience, and we're going to be adding a lot more automation into this process. But we'll go ahead and take a quick peek at where we're able to develop so far in this short time frame.

As you can see, they are now able to create a project, name the project based on the project name, and assign a project manager. They then can go and assign who they want to share this with, such as the project team or the key stakeholders, and double-check who that is. They can drill down from a project level, and then they can have multiple projects under one.

This app quickly allows them to take their exports from the carbon indexing tool that we provided, as well as Insight, and quickly upload these into the database to show the results. They can then add a narrative to help explain the impacts of the carbon sequestering values of bamboo versus traditional wood construction-type framing. This tool allows BamCore to quickly showcase on a splash screen or display to a client that is in a controlled environment both their embodied carbon and their energy impacts.

And so, with that, I'll go ahead and pass it back over to Hazem to go ahead and explain and show the impacts of how this tool is helping BamCore.

HAZEM KAHLA: Thanks, Luc. So when we talk about sustainable housing, we find most of the research on how to power the building using green energy. But too little we'll think about the building envelope and the building material.

A recent study showed that the thermal difference between traditional framing house and BamCore panels house over the lifecycle of 70 years for a 2,000-square-feet house reduces more than 200 metric tons-- 200 metric tons of carbon emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions of driving 500,000 miles. This is besides the savings on the operating cost and the benefits of better building envelope.

What we wanted by developing these tools with Microdesk is to show that our carbon benefit from bamboo is way better than wood, and that should be taken into consideration when the carbon credit is calculated. Thank you, everyone. I will leave the mic with Luc.

LUC WING: Thank you all again for joining us today. I just want to wrap it up. And just to kind of really drill down on the value and impact that BamCore brings. Not only are they saving time and cost on the jobsite, but the environmental impact is second to none, along with the structural impacts and the integrity of the BamCore wall systems. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn, or you can reach me on Twitter @lucwingnit. Thank you.