Hi All,
I’ve made a public release of the Grasshopper plugin I built for my master’s thesis. The tool is called Emu:
Emu is an interactive structural analysis and form-finding tool based on a 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) formulation of the dynamic relaxation method allowing engineers and designers to run non-linear bi-axial bending and torsion simulations in the parametric environment of Grasshopper3d. It is aimed to be used in early design stages but yet giving real structural feedback.
It’s completely free and I may consider continuing to develop it in case people like it and find it useful. I’ve put download link, examples and more info here:
I’d love to hear if anyone has any thoughts, comments or feedback. There is no set road-map for the project at the moment, so the future is very open-ended!
Hi, I have seen your post few times and I am wondering what is EMU for? Is it like Karamba? Can you explain it more using a simpler example like a simple beam? Where can we use EMU in real world? Is there any place in a structure that we can use Emu? Your example seems interesting but slightly complicated. Thanks
Thanks for the feedback.
I guess you could describe Emu as some sort of combination between Kangaroo and Karamba. It lets you deform and analyze structures and compute structural quantities (just like Karamba), but in a physical simulation fashion where the equilibrium configuration of the structure is found through iterating across time so you can see the transformation live and interact with it meanwhile (just like Kangaroo). I should mention that I’m a big fan of both Kangaroo and Karamba
DR (which is the underlying theory that Emu is built upon) is particularly powerful when you want to analyze structures with large deformations and pre-stress such as active bending and cable structures, but you should (in theory) be able to analyze any structure with it.
Yes, coming up with simple & relevant examples is hard… Did you see my beam example here? Although it doesn’t 100% show case the typical usage of Emu (it uses the LinearStatic solver which is not DR and does not account for large deformations). A typical use case is in fact simulating elastic gridshell erections. But I’d be happy to add other examples if you have anything specifically in mind? Maybe a beam with external pre-stress subjected to large deformations would be useful.
Hello Emil,
I am testing EMU for gridshell form-finding with rectangular sections ;
I started from the example you provided but cannot manage to get clean results
Here is the definition in case you have time to have a look
All the best,
SP EMU-gridshell form-finding.gh (46.2 KB)
