Discovery-performance-design

This paper reports on the use of advanced building performance simulation in the post-graduate design studio, which explored the role and limits of analytical tools in the early stage design process. Each project began with the environmental accounting diagram technique to situate the project in its social, ecological, and economic context. Within the discovered context, performance simulations were engaged for design synthesis rather than analysis of finalized building.

Interfacing BIM with building thermal and daylighting modeling

This paper presents our research and development of system interfaces between Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Building Energy Modeling (BEM), for supporting integrated architectural design and energy simulation. Our methods utilize the BIM authoring tools’ Application Programming Interface (API) to translate BIM into Object-Oriented Physical Models (in Modelica) for building thermal simulation, and input files of ray-tracing software (Radiance) for daylighting simulation. Based on the methods, we have created two prototypes: Revit2Modelica and Revit2Radiance.

Dynamic simulation of thermal capacity and charging/ discharging performance for sensible heat storage in building wall mass

The potential for utilization of the building mass thermal capacity for demand side management in the residential sector is addressed. A three apartment residential houses made of massive brick, equipped with a heat pump is modeled and its thermal behavior is simulated. It is shown that thermal storage capacity of the building can indeed contribute considerably to residential demand side management activities. Even after heating periods as short as two hours the heating demand for the following four hours can be reduced by almost 20 %.

Simulation of ground-coupled heat pump systems using a spectral approach

This paper presents a method using a spectral approach to simulate a hybrid ground-coupled heat pump system. At each time step, the algorithm computes the ground load based on the building load, the coefficient of performance and the capacity of the heat pumps (which are a function of the fluid temperature), and the equivalent borehole thermal resistance. To capture the nonlinearity between the fluid temperature and the ground load, an iterative process is used.

Rapid modeling of buildings with calibrated normative models

High-order models of building performance are the preferred tool, but their complexity and time requirements can cause difficulties when attempting to create large sets of models or when used by non-experts. Reduced-order models require fewer inputs and are simpler, but typically sacrifice accuracy for speed.

Towards zero energy industrial halls — simulation and optimization with integrated design approach

Net-zero energy building (NZEB) is thought to be the building of choice, but in practice, is also synonym  to high investment cost. It is, therefore, very important to investigate if the amount of the additional capital investment could be recouped from the energy saving (or generation). The investigation is particularly meaningful for industrial halls for the great energy saving potential (with respect to the high energy demand) and the ready energy generation possibility (due to favourable building geometry).

State-parameter identification problems for accurate building energy audits

Building performance simulation often fails to predict accurately the real energy performance, mostly due to great uncertainties in the input data. Errors in com-puted performance are particularly significant in the case of existing buildings, for which the amount of in-formation about intrinsic characteristics is low. How-ever, efficient energy retrofit operations make neces-sary an accurate understanding of the initial state of a building using a calibrated prediction model. Sev-eral works have investigated the use of identification techniques for model calibration.

Urban energy lifecycle: an analytical framework to evaluate the embodied energy use of urban developments

Given the dominating impact of the built environment on global carbon emissions, reducing operational energy use in buildings has long been considered a key strategy towards more sustainable urban development. In contrast, building energy use related to material production, construction, and demolition has been considered to be significantly less important. However, given the proliferation of low and even net zero energy buildings, more holistic life cycle assessment (LCA) of buildings becomes necessary.

Building energy demand response simulation for an office tower in New York

This paper presents a building energy simulation study of the impact of electrical peak demand reduction strategies in a large office tower in New York that has extensive use of daylight responsive dimmable ballasts, and under floor air distribution systems (UFAD). The complexity and large size of the building imposed careful simplification of the simulated geometry in order to make the simulations and results analysis manageable.

Development of a new tool for the co-simulation using decomposition of building and HVAC systems in sub systems

Towards the achievement of Nearly-Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB), the call for high performance Building Systems (BS) is undeniable. In order to provide, control and reduce the energy used by the BS, complex and sophisticated technologies are more and more introduced. This complex scenario requires computer simulation to evaluate the building performance at design time. To reach this goal, a Building Performance Simulation Tool (BPST) should carefully consider the accuracy of each component’s input data and the sensitivity of the simulation results to these uncertainties.

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