Woaw! It’s been a while since my last article. More than a year.

I am happy to present you my new library for materialsdb.org. Consider as an alpha, see below in what’s next.

What’s materialsdb.org ?

In short it is an open standard to store material data. More details on official website. I have used it throughout my career for thermal analysis through Lesosai. It can store thermal conductivity, thermal capacity etc… but also data for other trades like structural analysis, acoustic analysis, like cycle analysis, fire behaviour. Names, description can be stored in multiple languages. Materials data can be stored for a specific country if material vary from a country to another. These materials data are directly updated by manufacturers themselves. It works great.

python-materialsdb library

What’s new ?

This library have a tool to convert materials data to IFC. IFC schema contains an IfcProjectLibrary entity which allow your store element types like IfcWallType, IfcSlabType etc… These project libraries can be read by BlenderBIM Add-on which means that you can then use it directly in your project to create wall with accurate materials data. Materials contains a custom property set to store materialsdb.org id which means Lesosai and other softwares using materialsdb.org can retrieve all material data with this id which have not be stored in IFC like translations in other languages. Default language is french and default country is Switzerland but you can easily modify your config as described in README.

If you are a manufacturer you can eventually also use it to create your own materials.

What’s next

Only material data from material IFC specifications property sets and basics like id are currently converted to IFC. Handling for the rest of the data can be easily added.

More tools to query material (by name, manufacturer, thermal conductivity etc…).

Testing: make sure that there is no unit mismatch. Check if ArchiCAD can use an IfcProjectLibrary in some ways.