English

As high performance design is becoming more desirable in the field of architecture, the need for supporting architects with environmental analysis tools is also growing. Rhino/Grasshopper is one of the most widely used platforms that are used by designers today. There are already a number of environmental plugins developed for Rhino/Grasshopper. However, Ladybug offers several advantages that are currently not offered by existing Rhino/Grasshopper related environmental design plugins.

The quality of a residential complex is based on numerous factors such as their access, privacy, legibility, appearance. Arrangement of the building blocks  and their influence on each other are also important parameters for evaluating the large residential design project . On the other hand, an important criterion for sustainable design is to take advantage of sustainable energies.

This paper deals with the energy man-agement problem of a railway station. This problem comes out from the VEGEP project whose goal is to prove the benefit of an energy manager in railway sta-tions. The project focuses on an existing railway sta-tion with electric appliances and complex HVAC com-posed of micro-cogeneration system, gaz boiler, ther-mal storage tank and heat spreaders. The model has been used to compute best energy management strate-gies that minimizes a compromise between dissatis-faction and costs.

At the Passivhaus of Cherasco, located in Pianura Padana (Italy), an earth to air heat exchanger (EAHE) and natural night ventilation (in summer) are used to deliver comfort conditions with very low energy consumption. One  year and a half of continuous measurements have been carried out in order to evaluate the energy and comfort performances of this building, which combines the Passivhaus concept with local architectural solutions. We present an analysis of the system constituted by building envelope and EAHE.

The paper documents an ongoing study in the use of Building Performance Simulation (BPS) as a source of feedback in the early stages of architectural design. Taking advantage of the specific affordances provided by parametric scripting for design, fine-grained data about design evolution is gathered from a group of ar-chitecture students. Through the use of computational tools for data analysis, the aim is to gain understand-ing into patterns of scripting in conjunction with BPS.

This study reviews typical assumptions for days of operation, sub-space type receptacle and other unregulated process loads, and occupancy rates to propose a risk evaluation for energy simulation accuracy of office buildings. Office building simulations entail low-, medium-, or high- risk of being inaccurate based on the variation of key energy simulation parameters from typical values used in office buildings. The three parameters and associated risk should indicate a potential difference between projected design and actual energy use for high performance office buildings.

In this article, an under-floor air distribution system is analyzed.  The inlet device is placed near a thermal manikin and several turbulence intensities are imposed. Sensitive parts of the body are exposed to the airflow. While global comfort index show no difference in comparison to classical air diffusion strategy, local evaluation of the convective heat flux reveals several particularities. The CFD study gives us not only temperature and velocity fields, but also flow path-lines around a virtual thermal manikin, allowing us to evaluate indoor environmental quality.