It has been a pleasure reading different views from geographically
dispersed professionals.
Dr. Tianzhen Hong, Dr. Konstantinos Papamichael and Prof. Murray Milne suggested Visual DOE,
BDA (Building Design Advisor) and an Architect Friendly Simulation Tool. I have
installed and used the first two last year and higly
recommend these tools depending on the purpose they serve. As far as I remember
I emailed Van Woods (BDA) about their achievement regarding the tools. I didn’t
know about Murray’s architect friendly tool, I will download from the
link provided. In short, Visual DOE is a visual interface to the DOE Engine
where as BDA can help someone with formulation of the design in early phases.
As explained in Dr. Papamichael’s email it also
links to other simulation engines (What some people call matrix cruncher) like
DOE, Delight and ECM. I don’t have any doubt about their contribution
towards better design.
- All these tools require a great
deal of effort to set up and run the simulation engine. Some can
understand or grasp software’s functionality quicker than the others.
Running energy simulation or making a building energy efficient is not the
only thing an architect does. (S)he deals with a
lot of complex issues. It is the architect who sketches the form of the
building and tries to explain it to others. It is nearly impossible to
include BSE (Building Services Engineer) in this stage. Say, when I am
sketching a concept, I usually work on the form (That’s 50% of the
energy conscious design). Well, I know about the guidelines available or
what can make the building more energy efficient – but I am never
sure of how the building performs (to be precise, its form). Mr. Calbert, I agree with you, it is always better to have
BSE’s in the team from early design
stages, but architecture is not only an engineered product, it also
satisfies some aesthetic, philosophical purposes. Even when some
architects work in the team – concept comes from one person and it’s
a blackbox/ intuitive thing – matter of complex
cognitive activities of humans. Of course, the design gets refined from brainstorming
activities, but before that most of the decisive decisions are taken. During
early stages ideas, concepts, data and information all are ill-structured,
ill-defined. Apart from aesthetic – engineering controversy, think
from a business point of view – some architectural firms can’t
afford to have a separate BSE in the team. Some of the designs are won
through competitions and there’s no project management team to
oversee these collaborations.
- It is now easier to define
geometry and run a simulation than say, 5 years ago. But these tools are
not integrated with the design process, rather they force you to get out
of drawing program (which is now ** 3D object based **) and start another
simulation software, define or draw your geometry again, define HVAC
system (if required) and run the simulation. Why do I need to define the
geometry whereas I have already done that in CAD software? You might say,
you can draw your geometry in VISIO or ArchiCAD or ADT (Architectural
Desktop) and export is in .IFC (Industrial Foundation Classes) format and
import it to EnergyPlus. Is it from the CAD software you are doing all
these? Nope. You export your CAD file to .IFC format. Use separate utility
to map .IFC file to .IDF(EnergyPlus input file).
Here’s the point: What if you want to change your window and see how
the building performs? You will have to go back to your CAD software and
redo the whole thing again and again until you find something satisfactory.
- What I said earlier, we have great
analytical simulation tools like DOE, EnergyPlus, Lightscape
as matrix cruncher; We have IFC (though a prototype) or gbXML or ifcXML as
specification to represent building information; we have some CAD tools
with IFC implementation (ArchiCAD, VISIO, ADT …); we also have BDA
as interface to these matrix crunchers – WHY NOT A TOOL WHICH WILL
FIT WITHIN THE EXISTING DESIGN DOMAINS WITHOUT THE NEED TO CHANGE THE
PROCESS? All my geometric information is within ArchiCAD/ ADT/ VISIO –
and I don’t want to specify again. The information is not lines or
3D extrusion from 2D shapes – these are rich – It contains all
the information I need to input into Energy Simulation software.
Peter DeWilde has rightfully addressed some of the issues
describing IAI-IFC initiative and Fried Augenbroe’s
DAI initiative. IFC’s a mammoth task as they
want to represent the whole industry and every process in that. To get a
matured representation for use in the real-life scenarios, I believe we will
have to wait couple of more years. But I have reservations about the way Building Simulation industry as a whole is proceeding. Vendors want
to implement their own data standards without any sympathy to existing process
and initiatives. On the other hand, we are slow to uptake new technologies; e.g.
XML came after IFCs. If the industry took a greater initiative
to implement XMLs than IFCs,
probably we wouldn’t need to talk about all these now -> without any
disrespect to IFC or ISO-STEP (which is hard for novice software developer to
understand and implement).
Peter also mentioned
that for a “blackbox” intuitive
simulation tool, some sacrifices need to be made in terms of efficiency and
accuracy of the result. All the analytical simulation tool (not intuitive
ones!) makes a lot of assumptions and these are also termed as “near
accurate”. All an architect needs is a feel for the energy performance of
the proposed solution. Not detailed analysis (CFD) or detailed design (BSE’s are for that). We would be happy with the near
accurate (!) things.
Research only shows
the way, sometimes it is not directly a marketable product. Unless and until we
have a reliable commercial product, holistic concept of “Energy
Conservation” will be limited to conference and journal papers, workshops
and seminars. Think of DOS and Windows – if all the computers of the
world were run using DOS, would you have millions of users?
Regards,
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Monjur M Mourshed
IRUSE
Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable
Engineering
National University of Ireland Cork. Ireland.
Web: http://www.ecaad.com/monjur
http://www.ucc.ie/iruse/monjur
Email : m.mourshed@xxxxxxxxxxx
monjur@xxxxxxxxx
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