Hi everyone,
I’m a 16-year-old developer and aspiring architecture student from Russia. I’ve spent a lot of time studying environmental analysis workflows (like Ladybug/Butterfly), and while they are incredibly powerful, I noticed that running CFD or thermal simulations during the very early conceptual massing phases can be computationally expensive and slow.
To explore a faster alternative, I built Polymère (AHI) - a real-time building physics engine that runs entirely in the browser using WebGPU compute shaders.
How it works under the hood:
- It takes an IFC model and runs a GPU-accelerated conservative voxelization pipeline to create a semantic grid.
- Solves airflow using a custom Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM D3Q19) written entirely in WGSL.
- Couples this with a Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) solver to calculate buoyancy and thermal comfort (PMV/PPD per ISO 7730).
- Calculates acoustic reverberation using a 3D FDTD solver.
It’s not meant to replace OpenFOAM or EnergyPlus for final compliance, but rather to give instant feedback (running at 60fps on mid-range GPUs) during the sketch phase.
Links:
Live platform: https://polymère.com/ (you can test it right in the browser)
Whitepaper (math & methodology): Polymère - Revealing the Invisible
My ask to this community:
Since you all are the experts in computational design and simulation workflows, I would love your honest feedback.
- Does the simulation feel intuitive for conceptual design?
- Would a tool like this be useful as a standalone web app, or does this kind of speed only make sense if integrated directly into Rhino/Grasshopper via an API/Live link?
Tear my physics and UI apart! I want to learn and improve it. Thanks for your time!