Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation technique was used to study the effect of air distribution and supply parameters on ventilation performance and comfort of occupants in a government office building in Ottawa, Canada. The floor studied had two separate ceiling-based air supply systems, a slot system and a nozzle system with personal environmental control capability. In situ measurements were used to validate the results of the CFD simulation. Good agreements between the measured and predicted data were observed.

Building performance simulation tools have significantly improved in quality and depth of analysis capability over the past thirty-five years. Yet despite these increased capabilities, simulation programs still depend on user entry for significant data about building components, loads, and other typically scheduled inputs. This often forces users to estimate values or find previously compiled sets of data for these inputs.

This paper focuses initially on the calculation of the flows of exergy corresponding to the energy demand of buildings for the following uses: heating and cooling in the air handling units, local (room level) heating and cooling, lighting, ventilators and electrical appliances. The calculation method is presented as well as its implementation in the existing energy-calculation software.

The aim of this paper is to show the influence of the atmospheric boundary layer profile on the distribution of velocity in a building having two large openings. The knowledge of the flow form inside a building is useful to define a thermal environment favourable with thermal comfort and good air quality. In computational fluid dynamics, several profiles of atmospheric boundary layer can be used like logarithmic profiles or power profiles. This paper shows the impact of these profiles on the indoor airflow. Non-ventilated or ventilated parts of room are found.

Hygrothermal modeling of building envelope has received much attention and development in recent years; to increase its flexibility and accessibility is a consequential task. A powerful multi-physics simulation program, FEMLAB is applied to explore an efficient method of hygrothermal modeling. This paper presents a hygrothermal model and its application to analyze moisture behavior of typical North American building envelope systems. Comparison between simulation and experiment is made.

In this paper we emphasize a technique based on graph theory that allows for deriving both a dimensionally reduced object model required for setting up a thermal multizone model and a geometrical model for defining a single or multiple CFD domains in a building model together with incidence matrices correlating these models. The incidence matrices are an essential precondition for establishing a runtime coupling between both approaches such as automatically providing a CFD model with boundary conditions obtained during a thermal multizone simulation and vice versa.

This paper deals specifically with analysis of the thermal, airflow and daylighting performance of the façade elements and in particular with the Double Skin Façade (DSF) applied to the south and southeast facing office spine of a laboratory building. DSF have been applied successfully in Europe for a number of years with the desire to create a more natural internal climate, good daylight quality and access to outdoor air.

The paper describes a process that efficiently supports the early building design stage with prototype tools to capture topological floor plan sketches, calculate geometries, explore design alternatives, and generate data for performance simulations, for example for EnergyPlus. It is also shown how such data are used to generate object-model based simulators in the Virtual Building Laboratory environment. Examples and preliminary efficiency data are presented.

This work presents a simple design tool for the consideration of solar rights in urban design that was developed by the use of the computer model SustArc (Capeluto and Shaviv, 1997). This simple design tool allows the generation and evaluation of building configurations, ensuring solar rights of each neighboring building, as well as those of open spaces among them, by using the concept of solar envelopes without the need to be familiar with any specialized software.