The lack of widespread use of building environmental design decision support tools in architecture appears to be because the tools are often too simplistic. Designers find it difficult to trust the output of a tool that apparently trivialises the design issues. Even, regular users of simulation have a difficult time developing procedures to ensure that they can trust the output of the simulation. A web site has been developed which addresses this need directly. This paper describes the design principles on which the web site is based.
The paper describes new improvements in SOLENE, a set of numerical models for the simulation of natural light in both the urban morphologies and the indoor architectural spaces which is developed in our laboratory. This tool takes into account the direct solar and the diffuse sky luminous energies for the evaluation of luminance, that can be computed on the real surfaces of the environment (ground, walls), or on a false working plane. The tool allows the computation of some classical parameters (daylight factor), but makes it possible to get other informative descriptors.
This work wants to provide the planners with a database of the typical mediterranean building structures. This provides a set of coefficients of the transfer functions which describe exactly the thermal behaviour of the structure, the time lag and the attenuation of the heat flux. For each structure is individualised the best number of coefficients and roots to assure the reliability of the thermal simulation.
The aim of this work is to present a computer application that was developed to be a user-friendly interface that simplifies the manipulation of weather data files. The computer code is capable of creating and editing .EPW (EnergyPlus) and .TMY2 (Typical Meteorological Year II) weather files and making some translation between the two formats. It is part of an academic project that comprises the development of a series of applications, which together will consist of a complete interface for illumination/Thermal Comfort simulations using the EnergyPlus engine.
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