IES Blog

Our brand spanking new Student Showcase blog will feature guest bloggers from around the world who have used the <Virtual Environment> software to complete their studies. If you would like your work to be considered for the Student Showcase blog drop me an email at john.goucher@iesve.com.

Several researches [IEA–ECBCS Annex 44 (2007) and (2010)] have demonstrated that, in order to overcome the limitation given by the existing technologies, the building as a whole system should be revisited as a more integrated organism, characterized by a “responsive” and “dynamic” behaviour. In particular Responsive Building Elements (RBE) represent a promising technology for achieving the requirements posed by the ZEB concept. Among other RBEs, Advanced Integrated Façades (AIFs) have been – and still are – widely investigated, especially because of the key role that the building envelope plays in controlling the energy and mass transfer between outdoor and indoor.

This MSc thesis work in Building Engineering consists in the energetic performance evaluation of an innovative AIF module, ACTRESS (ACTive, RESponsive and Solar), which has been conceived within a wider research activity on Responsive Building Elements, carried out by the TEBE Technology Energy Building Environment research group of the Polytechnic University of Turin, of which the author is part. The ACTRESS module is designed as a one story height prefabricated Multifunctional Façade Module, consisting of two sub modules (50%-50%), one opaque and one transparent. The opaque sub-module is constituted by an Opaque Ventilated Façade (OVF) equipped with axial fans for the hybrid (fan-assisted) ventilation of the cavity. The OVF integrates aSi PV panels on the outer surface, with a sandwich, made up of VIP and PCM layers, PV activated during winter.  The transparent sub-system is made of high performance glazing: triple glazeing lowE (internal) with cavity lowE operable venetian blinds (outer cavity), and Argon gas (inner cavity).

:: IES simulation of the  innovative ACTRESS façade module and results ::

ModelIT, SunCast, ApacheSim, MacroFlow and ApacheHVAC were used to model the different components of the AIF façade. The simulations showed important results. In the cooling season the façade is able to reduce the entering heat flux by more than 60% for the 50% of the occupation period, with an average improvement of 10% from NV to MV. The cumulated frequency analysis for the heating season shows that the façade has a high capability to preheat the cavity air, which can be used as Supply Air for the HVAC system, provideing the 20% of the heating plant load during winter. In the mid season the high values of preheating efficiency enable the use of cavity air as indoor environment supply air when (preheating efficiency) is between 1 and 2.

ACTRESS module improves the PV efficiency up to 10%, with a medium value of 5%, if compared to the electric efficiency of a BIPV on a vertical façade with no integration with any thermal system.

Comparing the ACTRESS module with a traditional façade the overall reduction of primary energy demand in an office building results in 52% less total energy demand (heating, air conditioning and electric), passing from 19,09 kWh/m³y to 9.09 kWh/m³y, with a significant reduction in heating loads EE_h, due to the use of PV energy to activate the PCM in the OVF (almost 53%). While it is also remarkable how the electric consumption can be almost totally covered, 95%, on an annual basis by the PV electric production, already accounting for PCM and fan consumption. Furthermore it was evaluated the possibility to exploit the OVF preheated air as supply air for the HVAC system during heating and mid season. Thus increasing the heating energy saving by 8% in respect to ACTRESS façade with Outdoor Air Curtain ventilation. In this way more than 55% reduction can be achieved, with 8,55 kWh/m³y total energy consumption.

Concluding the ACTRESS module shows a very good performance, concerning both the sub-components behaviour and the overall building energy demand. This investigation highlighted a poor performance of IES VE in simulating innovative components, as proper modeling needed tips and shortcuts not known to junior and medium designer, and assumption which can jeopardize the energy simulation reliability and accuracy. Data on its actual performance will be collected through a yearly experimental campaign, which is just started, which will allow a validation of the assumptions done.

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Tags:Building, Engineers, Environment, IES, software, students

This month, we have had loads of questions from you about UK Compliance and the changes with Part L 2010. So we will be focussing on how to use the Virtual Environment to create UK EPCs, if you are outside of the UK, sorry, this one is VERY specific!

As many of you will know by now Part L 2010 came into force in October last year, even though the related EPC section has been delayed until the 27th of March this year. This means that building regulations DER/ TER (both at design and completion stage) will be to Part L 2010, but the EPC calculations will still have to be carried out using Part L 2006 methodologies. You can read more about this here. This has posed an interesting problem for our software team, and as such we have had to come up with an innovative solution.

To make it as easy for you as possible, we have introduced a brand new backward compatibility function that enables you to easily switch, on the same computer, between the 2010 and 2006 IES VE Compliance modules.  This is essential for designers that need to access Part L 2006 software for ‘as built’ or EPC calculations, as it will negate the need to duplicate data input in different software versions.

In order to generate an EPC you will have to have version’s VE 6.1.1 AND VE 6.2.0.3 installed;

If you are a VE-DSM 2010 user click here for download instructions…

If you are a VE-Ware (VE-SBEM) user click here for download instructions…

If you are a SketchUp user click here for download instructions…

Do you have any other burning questions for us for next months Questions and AEC? If so get in touch on Twitter, Facebook, or drop us an email hello at iesve.com.

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Tags:aec, Building, compliance, downloads, Environment, EPCs, sketchup, software, VE-Ware

Earlier this year, I attended & was proud to present at The 10th REHVA World Congress – Clima 2010 in Antalya, Turkey. There were over 1,000 attendees from 56 countries at the HVAC congress. Attendees included two former ASHRAE presidents, one former CIBSE president - OBE, the current IBPSA president and the chairman of CIBSE Guide- A Steering Committee. There were 460 papers presented orally & 180 posters took place. Needless to say it was a huge success.

If you are unaware, REHVA is the Federation of European HVAC Associations and represents over 100,000 engineers from 28 European countries.

A feature of the biannual REHVA World Congress is the International student competition. Having graduated with my MSc. from Brunel University in 2009, I was asked to enter the competition. The European association I was representing was CIBSE, which I know is not specific to any one European country, but a collective nomination from the UK & Ireland nevertheless.

Apart from commending the success of the event, I wanted to blog about a fascinating project of the student competition, by Geert Filippini of Royal Haskoning in The Netherlands. Geert went on to win the competition, and deservedly so. Geert’s research work on a low energy micro-climate was very impressive. I’ve attached an image below of his built prototype which was tested in a climate chamber in the Eindhoven University of Technology.

The fresh air is being supplied directly into the microclimate of the occupant so the he/she is given a psychological feeling of being in control of his/her own environment. The radiant panel is a low energy feature (14% less energy), again because the local heating & cooling is taking place in the occupant’s working environment. A very clever idea!

I’ve analysed the concept using <VE> – MicroFlo for a typical day and the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analyses does also seem to certainly prove the concept.�
Please see the latest edition of the REHVA Journal & I hope to see you at the next annual conference In Tallinn in May 2011.

Liam

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Tags:ASHRAE, CIBSE, climate, Engineers, Environment, REHVA World Congress

Having recently become a father of a baby girl, I have now started living a life as a father. No doubt it is a tough job and it sure is challenging, but on the other hand it is joyful. You might think why am I writing about fatherhood in this blog? Because how you raise or take care of a baby is closely related to our environment.

I read an article last month about being a “green family”. The couple are raising their kid in a diaper free environment. Just a bit of fact, on average a baby will go through about 6,000 disposable diapers by the time he/she turns two years old, that means millions of diapers end up in the landfills every day, taking about 200-500 years to decompose. At first I thought this sounds a bit exaggerated, but now I do believe 6,000 diapers in two years maybe achievable.

So one solution for this is of course change to cloth nappy, and at best nappy-free. This sounds easy, but it does require quite a bit of effort. I do admire the couple’s effort getting their baby to use the cloth nappy all the while and turn nappy free after six months. We have tried using just the cloth when our baby was about 1 -2 months, but soon realised it is too much trouble and have then switched to disposable. After reading this, I think I should try using the cloth nappy again since she is now older and the frequency for toileting should not be as high as before. I was always hoping to see something like bio-degradable diapers (since we can have bio-degradable plastic bags, why not for diapers) in the market, but so far no luck, I think this will be a good product for the market.

I may not be doing so well on the diapers side, but I do try to help the environment in other area, i.e. after bathing our baby, will keep the water for flushing the toilet. There are also a lot of things parents can do or be aware of, for example, not to buy too many baby clothes as you will soon realise they can’t fit in them after wearing a few months as they just grow too quickly. Don’t buy too many toys, as they probably prefer parents playing with them instead (at least that what I have noticed). 

Let’s not forget our children’s’ future environment while happily raising them.

To read the “Green Family” article, please click here.

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Tags:Environment, free, nappies

In the USA - the birthplace of behavioural psychology - you may hear of people going to see a “shrink”. When we think about people who are actively involved in creating a sustainable World, we think of policy makers, industry leaders, innovators and engineers. So how can a “shrink” shrink our environmental impact?

It has long been established by psychologists such Erwin Schroedinger and BF Skinner that much of our behaviour is controlled by the unconscious mind, implying that we are driven more by our desires, instincts and emotions, as opposed to rational thought and our ‘civilised’ modern environment. (You only have to see the way that software developers descend on a fresh chocolate cake; akin to a pack of vultures!)  Many leading scientists strongly believe in the existence of ‘selfish genes’ inherent in every one of us, giving us a genetic tendency to “look after #1.”

If we think of that chocolate cake as a bountiful World full of natural resources, we can clearly see the same thing happening on a bigger scale. Entire nations clamour for the few fish left in our oceans (remember the cod wars?); global corporations compete for the ‘right’ to remove the remaining fossil fuels from the Earth only for energy providers to compete for their perceived right to burn as much of these resources as their considerable profit margins allow. If you wondered why the Copenhagen summit last year was such a failure, you only have to think about the human condition. We didn’t get to the top of the food chain by being considerate, sustainable and nice to each other.

As the developed World strives for a better quality of life and material values, the developing nations naturally want the same things. With the World population predicted to rise from 6.5b to over 9bn in the next forty years, there are already concerns about shortages in global food production and drinking water. How long will it take before we fully understand it is our greed-driven lifestyles and subconscious desires that form the root of the problem?

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Tags:Engineers, Environment, Sustainability, USA

Apparently VE-Gaia was named after the Greek goddess of the earth rather than James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis but I am using this tenuous link to talk about him in an IES blog anyway.

Gaia was the name that William Golding, the author, suggested for Lovelock’s hypothesis that life on earth has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life. The Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by the environmental community but was not so readily accepted by the scientific community, including Richard Dawkins.

To my shame I only really knew of Lovelock through his Gaia hypothesis, and the fact that he upset many of his environmentalist fans on his pro nuclear power stance, but I saw an interesting programme on BBC 4 about him this week. He has had an amazing career as an independent scientist with his lab being the converted barn at his home in Cornwall. The program highlighted his work at NASA where he proposed using the atmosphere on Mars to determine whether there was life on the planet. It turned out that Mars has a relatively inert atmosphere of mostly CO2 with very little oxygen, methane, or hydrogen - very different to that of the Earth where there is life.

Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture device allowed very small levels of chemicals to be detected in the atmosphere, including CFCs. He took a trip by ship down to the Antarctic to measure CFC’s across the earth and then wrote a paper in the journal Nature that showed that CFCs were not being broken down in the atmosphere. After hearing a lecture on the subject of Lovelock’s results, Frank Rowland and Mario Molina embarked on research that resulted in the first published paper that suggested a link between stratospheric CFCs and ozone depletion in 1974, and later shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.

Lovelock also invented the Microwave oven and has been published in the journal Nature so many times it would make any academic green with envy.

You can still find the programme information, ‘Beautiful minds’, on the BBC Website, amd a video clip can be found here.

Like Lovelock, Thomas Midgley, Jr. was another very talented scientist that was celebrated for his discoveries and patents. His legacy is somewhat different to Lovelock’s though. Midgley was the scientist that developed the ‘lead’ additive in petrol. He was also on the team that developed the use of CFCs as a refrigerant. Perhaps luckily for him he died in 1944 before anybody discovered the effect his discoveries had on the atmosphere.

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Tags:Academic, Environment, Environmentalists, IES, Sustainability, VE-Gaia

eSim, IBPSA-Canada’s biennial conference, brings together professionals, academics and students interested in building performance simulation. Being held, in Winnipeg, Canada on May 19 and 20, this year’s conference will focus on recent developments for modelling the physical processes relevant to buildings, methods for modelling whole-building performance (including integrated resource management, renewable energy sources and combined heat, cool and power generation) and the use of building simulation tools in code compliance and incentive programs.

IES is happy to have been asked to be a part of the conference, as performance modelling becomes an ever-important part of the design process. Not just a software developer, but also a respected International consultancy, IES is trying to tackle the big problems of sustainable building design, focusing on analysis of a design throughout the entire process.

One of our consultants will be showcasing the IES Virtual Environment as part of the Software Demo Sessions. Much like technical presentations, these special demo sessions will be presented in front of a live audience during the show.  We’ll be covering the latest step-by-step workflow interface capabilities and LEED developments in our software.

A quick overview of us for those less familiar – IES provides advanced performance analysis for all types of sustainable strategies and LEED evaluation for existing buildings, new construction and core and shell projects, among others. Its software and consulting services help design teams to integrate ‘green’ design strategies throughout all stages of the design process and beyond to create low-energy sustainable buildings. IES Consulting is also a BIM GSA contract holder.

If you won’t be at eSim this year and are interested in a demo of the Virtual Environment either in-person or via web conferencing, we would be happy to arrange one at your convenience. We run regular weekly web demo sessions.  Please register online at http://www.iesve.com/Software/Web-Demo

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Tags:Academic, BIM, Building, Environment, Renewables

On April 22, 2010, the ‘Global Day of Conversation’ engaged more than 500 mayors and locally elected officials around the world in separate conversations within their local communities on issues of climate, energy and sustainability. This Global Day of Conversation illustrates the commitment of millions to make the natural environment a priority for 2010 and beyond.

However, with the arrival of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the United States has failed to enact a comprehensive climate bill. The Earth Day Network insists Congress enacts climate and clean energy legislation in 2010.

On Sunday, April 25, Earth Day Network and partner organizations organized a massive climate rally on the National Mall, Washington DC. With the participation from thousands, The Climate Rally is a chance to be heard on climate legislation and tell Washington;

“It’s time to enact climate and clean energy legislation.”

The Climate Rally also featured live music from Sting, John Legend, The Roots, Jimmy Cliff, Passion Pit, Bob Weir, Willie Colón, Joss Stone, Robert Randolph and many more.

The White House Response
Washington, D.C. – On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Vice President Biden announces the selection of 25 communities for up to $452 million in Recovery Act funding to “ramp-up” energy efficiency building retrofits. However, more than $3.5 billion in applications were received for the just over $450 million in Recovery Act funds available, an eight-fold difference, indicating significant demand for investment in energy-saving and job-creating projects like these across the US.

The selected projects for a retrofit ramp-up are available by clicking here.

On a final note, Earth Day 2010 is a pivotal opportunity for individuals, corporations and governments to join together and create a global green economy. Please get involved and let every day be an earth day!

Liam

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Tags:Building, climate, earth day, Environment, Sustainability

We’ve all heard about ENERGY STAR.

And you probably heard President Obama talk about the Home Star (aka “Cash for Caulkers”) program recently. Designed to provide financial incentives for homeowners who perform a variety of energy-efficiency upgrades, the Home Star program is urging Americans to green up their homes while getting a little green in return.

Well, add another “star” to the list. Melissa Hincha-Ownby reported earlier this week about USGBC’s support of the proposed Building Star legislation, which, if passed, will provide incentives for energy-efficient retrofits for existing buildings. Similar to Home Star, Building Star will provide financial incentives for energy-efficiency retrofits in multi-family residential units as well as commercial buildings.

According to the MNN article, “Every year, the American economy loses more than $130 billion from leaky, inefficient buildings,” Fedrizzi added. “We can change that through the advancement of programs like Building Star - which would create approximately 150,000 jobs. Senators Merkley and Pryor get the ‘gold star’ for introducing it; now all the Senate has to do is include it in the next jobs package.” {Source: USGBC} Therefore, if passed, according to an article on Earth2Tech, “the program is expected to save building owners more than $3 billion on their energy bills annually by reducing enough peak electricity demand to avoid the need for nearly three dozen 300 MW power plants.”

This looks like a good deal all the way around. Building will be upgraded, saving the building owners money for heating, cooling and other inefficiencies. Plus that’s less strain on the environment. And more retrofits means more jobs, which will continue to boost the economy and create more spending in other areas.

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Tags:Building, Energy Star, Environment, reduce, USGBC

The New CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme came into force on 1st April

The new Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme began in earnest on the 1st April! The scheme aims to achieve an annual energy reduction of 3.2m tonnes by 2020 and stimulate businesses to make their buildings more energy efficient.  It affects around 20,000 organisations – is yours one of them?

Any organisation with a half hourly settled electricity meter needs to do something.  It was the requirement for qualifying organisations to start monitoring energy usage from all qualifying sources that started on 1st April 2010.  And whilst it may be straight forward to gather retrospective data from half hourly sources, this may not always be the case for class 5-8 meters, for example, which are also considered as core sources under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.

Those qualifying for the CRC will also need to register while those under the threshold still need to make an information disclosure.  Both actions must be done before 30 September 2010.  However, as the process could take up to 4 weeks to complete don’t leave it until the 29th September!

A raft of recent surveys indicates just how confused and unprepared organisations are for its implementation…

A survey by energy consultancy McKinnon and Clarke found that 54 per cent of participants were uncertain whether they come under the scheme, which encompasses all bodies and businesses with half-hourly meters (HHMs) that consumed more than 6,000 MWh of electricity during 2008.  Around 5,000 of the UK’s heaviest energy users will need to participate fully, while another 15,000 odd organisations that consumed less will need to make an information disclosure. 

In addition, the survey also found that three in five companies had not factored in the financial implications of having to participate fully in the scheme.  At the lowest qualifying level, a typical organisation will pay £45,000 a year to advance purchase allowances at a rate of £12 per tonne of carbon dioxide.  In addition, they will be placed in a league table, showing their carbon emissions relative to their peers.  Companies at the bottom of the table will be penalised, with the money recycled into rewards for the most energy-efficient.

In another survey by the power supplier Npower, nearly half of companies surveyed said official advice about the new legislation had been “inadequate”.  About 49 per cent said they did not understand how to buy the necessary carbon allowances and 44 per cent said they do not know how to forecast their carbon emissions.

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Tags:Building, carbon assessor, Environment, recycle, recycling, Renewables