IBPSA2001

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).

The modeling of convective flows with 3D lattice Boltzmann fluid dynamics is presented using a lattice BGK approach for low Mach number flows with variable density combined with a large eddy turbulence model.

This report introduces the rapid prototype method newly developed to design individual housings. (Reference 1) Since the individual housing naturally owns different indoor configuration and surrounding environment, an introduction of the rapid prototype method into housing design is therefore effective. Especially, the scene of the individual housing with the surrounding buildings thus reproduced can allow to propose the individual housing not only as a housing simply, but also a special space emphasizing the relationship with the surrounding environment.

The application of building simulation for the thermal improvement of buildings in developing countries is limited by the scarcity of hourly climate data and test reference years. Therefore a generally applicable method was developed to select and  combine monthly periods of hourly data, that correspond best to long-time mean values and assure representative mean temperatures and global radiation in the TRY for Central Chile.

This paper contains the results of an on-going collaborative research effort by the departments of Architecture and Computer Science of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, U.S.A., to develop a computer visualization application for the structural analysis of building structures. The VIRTUAL-SAP computer program is being developed by linking PC-SAP4 (Structural Analysis Program), and virtual environment software developed using the SVE (Simple Virtual Environment) library.

The control industry integrates more and more recent innovations, especially on the  sector  of communication networks (bus), control (fuzzy logic, neural networks…)  and  informatic  (hard-and software) for the development of  Building Management Systems (BMS). The necessity of innovation on this field imposes on the control industry to develop faster and faster new products while managing perfectly the quality of the products.