As many of you know, last June I finished my 2nd master’s degree in Architecture and Energy in Germany, within which I learned to use Design Builder software. Now I will start researching and learning around the other programs that are related to the topic of Energy Modeling.
To make exact calculations that support, prove and optimize the design requires special engineers. Some calculations can also be done with special software developed especially for these purposes. The goal of this post is introduce some of the software for appropriate calculations. These calculations can be done during the design building phase in order to help prove different possibilities and develop te best concept from alls points of view. Te calculations help to develop the appropriate building constructions and elements with the optimal building space and operation concept also by considering the economic impacts.
As an example to make decisions about building materials in relation to their ecological characteristics and impacts, the ökobaud.dat https://www.oekobaudat.de is a source of values required for the calculation.
Whit the software Legep https://legep.de, all ecological impacts of a building and its life cycle (LCA) can be calculated. The softeare Legep was developed also to calculate Life Cycle Cost (LCC).
There are also other documents that help to evaluate the ecological values of building materials, e.g. Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), WECOBIS, GISCODE, etc.
To consider the physical characteristics of a building’s construction, the online source u-wert.net https://www.ubakus.de can be used.
Dämmwerk https://www.bauphysik-software.de and WUFI https://wufi.de are examples of software that were developed specially for building physics, to evaluate EnEV calculation. This is used to calculate and simulate the thermal, moisture or acoustic characteristics of a building’s constructions.
Lightin simulation software such as Dialux https://www.dial.de help to design appropriate daylighting and artificial lighting for a building.
Thermal or flow simulations can be done with software such as Trnsys, TRNFlow, ANSYSFluent, DesignBuilder, EnergyPlus, etc.
https://www.trnsys.de
https://www.ansys.com/products/fluids/ansys-fluent
https://designbuilder.co.uk/
https://energyplus.net/
All of these programs and many others help and support the design of different building concepts. They can be also used during the later phases of designing to prove and evaluate the final construction and technologies. They can be used by both architects or engineers.
However they do not replace engineers, who do precise calculations for the statics and thechnologies of the building.