The first energy efficiency law for Brazil was presented in 2001, which required that buildings should have some energy efficiency regulation. Salvador city building code was then submitted to a study to include energy efficiency parameters related to the building envelope. The energy consumption limits were associated with the envelope parameters using simulation and using a multi-variable regression equation developed using simulation.
Building simulation programs normally do not take into account moisture effects in soils temperature determination. However, the presence of humidity can strongly affect the temperature distribution in soils due especially to the evaporation/condensation mechanisms and the strong variation of their thermophysical properties.In order to calculate the temperature profiles in a more accurate way, we have developed the software Solum, which was conceived to model the coupled heat and moisture transfer in soils.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software is increasingly being used to predict the effects of wind on buildings and on the people in and around them. It is well suited to studying the effects of wind speed on pedestrian comfort within and around buildings. The technique is known as Computational Wind Engineering (CWE). This paper presents examples of how the authors have used commercial CFD codes for CWE to study the inclusion of new buildings in a campus at the University of Cambridge and inform the design team of its effects on human comfort.
A web-based, non-expert daylighting analysis tool has been developed to support daylighting-related design decisions in peripheral private offices during an early design stage. The tool offers a comparative, reliable, and fast analysis of the annual amount of daylight in the offices (daylight factor and daylight autonomy) and the lighting energy performance of automated lighting controls (occupancy sensors, photocells) compared to standard on/off switches.
The hygrothermal behavior of a building component exposed to weather is an important aspect of the overall performance of a building. Today the hygric transport phenomena through a building envelope are well understood and a realistic assessment of all relevant effects can be carried out by one of the numerous models and computer programs, that have been developed in different countries over the last years. The calculation of the hygrothermal performance of a part of the envelope is state-of- the-art, but until now, the total behaviour of the actual whole building is not accounted for.
Embedded generation has been described as a “paradigm shift” in the way in which electricity is produced, with the focus of power production shifting away from large centralised generation plants to production of heat and power close to the point of use. An emerging technology that may play a part in the evolution of this new paradigm is the ducted wind turbine (DWT). Up to this point, wind energy has not played a major role in embedded generation for the built environment.
The purpose of this research is to develope a simplified method to predict the relationship between the design of architecture envelope and the air- conditioning load in Taiwan. Four types of buildings including Office, Hospital, Hotel and Commercial Buildings with 4 regression formulas were established. The R-square value lies between 0.86 and 0.91 which is convincible. The norm „Regulations of Building Energy Conservation Design in Taiwan“ also referenced the results of this research.
The Design Analysis Integration (DAI)-Initiative aims to steer towards new solutions for design analysis integration. These solutions should be able to overcome the limitations of current interoperability approaches that assume the existence of generic and static interfaces in a ‘perfect world’ in which all information is structured and all mappings between design and analysis representations are computable. This paper reports on the first phase of the development, a first-generation prototype in ‘workbench’ style for managing a process driven design analysis dialogue.
Consoclim is a building energy simulation software package which aims to simplify the input data. The building is modelled by only one capacity and five resistances. The inputs related to the building are reduced to global U-values of the walls, solar factors of windows and two inertia parameters. This building model is assessed using BESTEST method. The results show that only few inputs are sufficient to characterise the building. A comparison with experimental data of building in operation shows a good agreement between the results on energy consumption of air conditioning system.
The aim of the European SSHORT (Sustainable Social Housing Refurbishment Technologies) project is to increase and promote rational and efficient use of energy in the retrofitting of social housing buildings. In this scope, one step was to evaluate with simulation studies the technical and economical interest of selected sustainable technologies on standard collective social housings in participating countries.
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