The use of daylighting and artificial lighting simulation programs to calculate complex systems and models in the design practice often is impeded by the fact that the operation of these programs, especially the model input, is extremely complicated and time-consuming. Programs that are easier to use generally do not show the calculation capabilities required in practice.
While visual rendering of buildings is the state of the art in today' s design programs, acoustic or auditory rendering is still in its infancy. This paper reviews some promising approaches to the computer simulation of sound propagation and perception in buildings. The range of methods spans from the numerical solution of the wave equation to advanced geometric methods based on ray tracing and radiosity algorithms. Furthermore concepts for modelling the human sound perception are discussed. Finally some issues of practical implementation will be addressed.
Full simulation of a building’s HVAC control is important. Good control is the most cost-effective way to reduce plant size and save energy and maintenance cost. To address these issues the control designer needs an easy to use, but accurate tool that simultaneously solves the building thermal, the HVAC system and its control performance. We have developed such a tool. Our new simplified, yet extensively verified, building model made an efficient integrated tool possible. The system simulation is also done using simplified yet accurate component models.
Much of the current building simulation research and development concentrates on improving user interfaces to simulation “engines”. The goal seems to be to make the software easier to use. This begs two questions: what interface to use? And, by what criteria is software ease of use measured? What is the intelligent personal (design) assistant1?
The present paper describes how the use of a modal synthesis method in the study of the thermal behaviour of buildings both facilitates and hastes the modelling step concerning the problem of linear conduction in multidimensional components. This work is divided into three sections: we first intro duce the substructuring approach applied to modal formulation; we then formally describe, through a simplified bidimensional example, the synthesis step leading to a global evolution model computed by substructuration.
Computer models used for analyzing heat transfer have been developed and computerized for the precise thermal analysis of two typical prefabricated radiant floor heating panels. The developed computer program was validated by comparing the computer simulation results against the scaled model test results. Computer simulations, for the sensitivity analyses of the various design parameters and control water temperature shows the thermal performance with the variations of these parameters and the relationship among these parameters.
Multiple regression analysis (MRA) is useful for developing energy prediction equations from the results of building energy simulation. However, if many design parameters are involved, a very large number of simulations is needed to generate data for the MRA. To tackle this problem, a randomised approach to MRA is proposed so that less simulations will be needed to generate the data. This paper presents a research study in Hong Kong that investigates building energy performance using a randomised MRA method.
This work describes the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation of flow and pollutant dispersion around a cube. The work attempts to model the characteristics of an atmospheric boundary layer type flow over a building which has a pollutant source at its roof centre. For the flow field, two different numerical schemes for the discretisation of convection have been employed namely the second order accurate QUICK scheme and the first order HYBRID-UPWIND scheme. The results for the velocity field appear to be inconclusive with reference to the merits of each of the schemes employed.
A new system for accessing wall and roof transfer function coefficients has been developed. The system is intended to allow users to quickly and easily retrieve the transfer functions for almost any combination of wall or roof materials, thus simplifying the use of the Transfer Function Method of simulation early in the design process. The new system has been designed as a tool that can be integrated with existing simulation software.
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