EETD News #3, Fall 1999
Table of Contents

High-Performance Commercial Buildings

A variety of information technologies affect the design, construction, operation, and financing of commercial buildings. If properly deployed throughout the building life-cycle, an integrated set of such computer tools could significantly enhance performance of all types of commercial buildings. In addition to providing increased comfort, health and safety to the building’s occupants, enhanced use of information technologies could contribute substantially to reducing energy consumption and maintenance costs.

Diagnostics for Building Commissioning and Operations

Many buildings fail to perform as well as expected because of problems that arise at various stages of the life cycle, from design to operation. These problems originate in different parts of the building, including the envelope, the HVAC system, and the lighting system. Consequences are increased energy costs, occupant discomfort, poor productivity, health problems, and higher maintenance costs. Examples are leaking ducts, stuck dampers, and disabled or poorly tuned control loops. Such faults can be detected either by active testing–for example, as part of building commissioning–or by passive monitoring during day-to-day operation.

Information Management for Performance Metrics

Buildings often do not perform as well in practice as expected during predesign planning, nor as intended by design. It is difficult to quantify the impacts and long-term economic implications of a building whose performance does not meet expectations. Current building construction and operational practices are devoid of quantitative feedback that could be used to detect and correct problems both in an individual building and in the building process itself.

EPIcenter: Montana State University's Green Building Project

The availability of "green" building technologies such as those that are energy- efficient or water-conserving, of renewable energy sources, and of sustainable building materials, has created the opportunity to turn new buildings into green showcases. Montana State University at Bozeman has seized this opportunity with a project called EPIcenter.

Bild-IT: An Integrated Design Tool for the HVAC Industry

EETD is involved in an international joint development project to create a computer-based tool called Bild-IT that supports integrated building design. The tool will link an architectural CAD system, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program and the building energy simulation program EnergyPlus, which is currently being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. The structure of the tool is shown in the Figure. Standard methods of exchanging design information within the tool and with other software tools will be developed, based on the International Alliance for Interoperability's Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), to provide an open, interoperable environment for equipment selection and HVAC system analysis. The other partners are the Canadian branch of AEA Technology; a UK-based CFD developer, the Halton Group, a Finnish manufacturer of HVAC equipment; and Olof Granlund, a Finnish building services consulting firm. EETD's work is being supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the other team members are supported by the Finnish research agency TEKES.

Desktop Radiance

Improved lighting and daylighting strategies have the potential to greatly reduce building energy use and improve the quality and productivity of indoor environments. To achieve these potentials, designers need to simulate quantitative and qualitative aspects of interior lighting related to comfort, energy, aesthetics, economics, and other factors. A software program called Radiance allows designers to accurately predict lighting and daylighting performance in spaces of arbitrary geometric complexity, as well as generate photometrically accurate renderings for qualitative assessment. Studies show that Radiance is the most accurate daylighting simulation software available today.

Building Design Advisor

To make decisions, building designers need to predict performance with respect to considerations such as comfort, safety, aesthetics, and cost. To accurately predict energy and environmental performance, designers need to use sophisticated simulation tools, like the DOE-2 building energy simulation program and the Radiance lighting/daylighting simulation and rendering software. The problem is that these tools, developed by researchers for research purposes, are not easy to use.

Current Status of Software Interoperability and DOE Tools

Throughout the building's life cycle, a variety of computer-based tools are used in the design, construction and operation of buildings, and massive amounts of data are generated, transferred, converted and manipulated. To reduce time, cost and frequency of error, it would be advantageous for each tool to be able to access a common building data model.

Software Roundup

Many of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Building Technology, State and Community Programs develop software tools to help researchers, designers, architects, engineers, builders, code officials, and others involved in the building life cycle in evaluating and ranking potential energy efficiency in new or existing buildings. A few of these tools are featured in this Newsletter. The following buildings-related energy tools—which include databases, spreadsheets, component and systems analyses, and whole-building energy performance simulation programs—were developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Environmental Energy Technologies Division and its partners.

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