A new approach to inter-zonal adjacencies analysis for building energy simulation programs

One of the main goals of sustainable development is the reduction of fossil fuel consumption. It can be done by applying a range of principles that help practitioners to move their projects toward the goal of natural energy resources conservation. The American Institute of Architects in their program 50»50 listed the fifty principles which when embraced individually or collectively will help to reduce the fuel consumption to 50%. One of these principles is «Energy modelling». There is a lot of building energy simulation software available on the market, one of them free of charge other commercial, but they are not commonly used in everyday designing because of their complicated interface for building geometry defining. Geometric information input required for the building energy modelling sometimes is so big that designers resign to use such tools. Every improvement in the process of geometric data input will help to disseminate using energy modelling. This paper presents a new approach to inter-zonal adjacencies analysis in building geometry. One can easy imagine two plans of adjacent building floors drawn on the same plane with two colours. Such sketch will show the elementary parts of floor adjacent to rooms or zones separated by this floor. In most energy simulation programs user has to input data about these elementary parts of walls, floors or partitions. The new approach uses the computational geometry and its topological maps and simplifies process of geometric data input.