English

Estimating  relative  humidity  from  outdoor  air temperature and humidity, and indoor air temperature is a means to assess thermal comfort conditions when indoor relative humidity is not available. Buildings in tropical countries are usually well ventilated in the summer and show a large infiltration area. Considering that sources of moisture are minimal in such cases, indoor absolute humidity can be assumed to be the same as the outdoor value.

The    eXtensible Markup Language (XML)  has recently become  the W3C  Standard      for commu nicating   data   over   the   Internet.      The   e- commerce    industry    and    several    new    software applications  have  embraced  this  technology  taking advantage of the    potential    for    re-usable    and interoperable  data.    In  order  to  take  advantage  of XML, each industry is coming up with standard tag terminologies   such   that   the   data   can   be   self describing  and  understandable,  independent  of  the application creating or using it.

A new building energy simulation program developed under support from the US government was released in April 2001. EnergyPlus is based on the most popular features and capabilities of BLAST and DOE-2 but is a completely new program written in Fortran 90.

This paper describes the energy performance of an underground thermal energy storage system that consists of high efficiency heat pump and Borehole- Heat-Exchangers (BHE). The energy conservation concept of this system is operation of the heat pump at higher efficiency using the Water-Source-Heat- Pump (WSHP). For this concept, the seasonal storage system using BHE under the ground is adopted as a Borehole-Thermal-Energy-Storage-System (BTES) with high efficiency WSHP.

The combinations of parameter effecting optimum energy consumption and good open view for designing side-window of office buildings are proposed. A generic reference building (GRB) is generated by using DOE2.1E, a building energy simulation program, under Thailand’s weather data. The base case of the office building model includes both the typical energy consumption characteristics and the daylight factor (DF) at various room depths. In the daylighting case, integrating the daylight with step dimming devices is considered for energy saving compared with the conventional lighting system.

There is a need for Dutch design support tools for building services that can be used in early design stages. TNO Building and Construction Research has therefore initiated the research project described here. The project will result in guidelines for design support tools for early design of building services in the Netherlands. These tools should make it possible to quickly compare alternative conceptual design solutions and to visualize possible consequences of the underlying design decisions.

We describe a mathematical model applied to analysis of hygrothermal behavior of buildings. A lumped approach to model the room air temperature and humidity is used and a multi-layer model in finite differences for the building envelope  is  employed. The capacitance model allows studying the transient air humidity and temperature of a room when it is submitted to the weather of the city of Curitiba-PR, Brazil.

The software DOMUS has been developed to model coupled heat and moisture transfer in multi-zone buildings. DOMUS has been conceived to be a very user-friendly software so that to stimulating a larger number of users in Brazil to use building simulation software and meet national energy conservation program goals. Besides this aspect, as the weather in Brazil permits the analysis of building architecture, thermal comfort passive strategies can be easily analyzed.

This paper reports on the progress of the S2 project. This is an ongoing effort toward an Internet-based environment for distributed collaborative performance-based building design and evaluation. A user can access the S2 system regardless of hardware, operating system or location on a network. Geographically distributed users can generate and edit building models via a platform-independent user interface. These building models can then be made subject to concurrent analysis by multiple simulation applications running on remote servers.

During the past few years, our research team has developed techniques to solve problems associated with designing a collaborative evaluation performance tool environment. This paper will describe the development of a  system (Web- IBEDO) that makes use  of  emerging communication technology. The system is being used as a model for a larger implementation of distributed multi-simulation environment. Web-IBEDO is a computer program that supports the simultaneous integrated use of simulation tools and multiple databases, over the World Wide Web (www).