A simple design tool for the thermal study of dwellings.

Describes a simple design tool called the 'office building module' (OPTI), which is intended to help building professionals to incorporate the impact of design choices on energy consumption when designing a project. Emphasises the importance of the program's user-friendliness, minimisation of data and speed. Dynamic thermal programs are needed to compute energy needs and estimate overheating. Current programs suffer from slowness and the need for large amounts of data. The software was designed using many parametric studies realised with a dynamic thermal program, together with the application of a method used in experimental research. States that the program provides annual thermal needs and thermal comfort (winter and summer) in relation to orientation, building footprint, window area and type, internal gains, presence of external or internal shading devices, ventilation strategy applied and thermal mass. Claims that although the present design tool is based on Belgian climatic weather data, the same step could be transposed to other climate data.