English

This paper investigates the environmental conditions inside a highly-glazed cross-ventilated meeting room. A 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of an indoor environment is developed with the support of the field measurements performed in a normally operating room.  The work presented here follows the steps of the formal calibration methodology for the development of CFD models of naturally ventilated environments. This paper utilises the calibration methodology in order to predict environmental conditions within the highly-glazed cross-ventilated room occupied by people.

Many attempts have been made to automatically convert architectural 3D models into thermal models for building performance simulation. This paper describes a method that is capable of abstracting an arbitrary building massing into a meaningful group of thermal shoebox models. The algorithm is meant to bridge the existing gap between architectural and thermal representations of the same building and to facilitate the use of energy models during schematic design by providing instant performance feedback from the massing stage onwards.

In oasis cities urban forest shades the lower level facades of buildings. It is thus crucial to analyze the distributional patterns of sun radiation produced by trees on facades. On the assumption that lighting behavior of trees as sun control elements more closely resembles a louvers system rather than other frequently used solar control systems (ej. perforated obstruction), the present study seeks to verify which of these formal simplifications adjusts better to the real case. The methodology used in this study relies on simulation models generated with hemispherical images.

Detailed experimental studies of heat and moisture transfers in building envelope parts are important to gain knowledge about hygrothermal responses and to validate models. For this purpose, a 20 m2 wooden-frame test house built in Grenoble, France, was widely instrumented to collect temperature and relative humidity at different depths in the wall, as well as indoor and outdoor conditions. Besides, a general simulation tool was selected to simulate coupled transfer at the building scale. In this paper, an experimental sequence is presented and simulated.

Choosing the optimal combination of building compo-nents that minimize investment and operational costs is a topic of great importance in the building simulation com-munity. Optimization using simulation tools, i.e., Energy-Plus, becomes computationally expensive for traditional search approaches. An additional challenge is the com-plexity of the input parameter space, which is usually very large and contains both continuous and discrete variables. In this paper, we present a novel approach to address both of these problems.

Developing a methodology of simulating tree shading on daylight performance in indoor spaces such as lux levels on a task plane is investigated. The findings will be useful in improving design of lighting environments in public buildings such as office buildings or classrooms. The method used a camera that takes hemispherical images, positioned in the centre of the task plane. Boundary conditions need to be defined at the outset include the type and age of the trees, the type of the sky and turbidity, the orientation of the window, the time of the day, and the time of the year.