Posts Tagged ‘Green building’

Simulating cool roofs with Energy3D

August 20th, 2014 by Charles Xie
Fig. 1: Solar absorption of colors.




Fig. 2: Compare dark and white roofs.





Visualization of heat flux in Energy3D using vector fields

August 14th, 2014 by Charles Xie
Fig. 1: Winter in Boston
One of the strengths of our Energy3D CAD software is its 3D visualizations of energy transfer. These visualizations not only allow students to see science concepts in action in engineering design, but also provide informative feedback for students to make their design choices based on scientific analyses of their design artifacts.

Fig. 2: Summer in Boston
A new feature has been added to Energy3D to visualize heat transfer across the building envelope using arrays of arrows. Each arrow represents the heat flux at a point on the surface of the building envelope. Its direction represents the direction of the heat flux and its length represents the magnitude of the heat flux, calculated by using Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction. Quantitatively, the length is proportional to the difference between the temperatures inside and outside the building, as well as the U-value of the material.

Fig. 3: Winter in Miami
The figures in this post show the heat flux visualizations of the same house in the winter and summer in Boston and Miami, respectively. Like the solar radiation heat map shown in the figures, the heat flux is the daily average. The U-value of the windows is greater than those of the walls and roof. Hence, you can see that the heat flux vectors in the winter sticking out of the windows are much longer than those sticking out of the walls or roof. In the summer, the heat flux vectors point into the house but they are much shorter, agreeing with the fact that Boston's summer is not very hot.

Fig. 4: Summer in Miami
Now move the same house to Miami. You can see that even in the winter, the daily average heat flux points inside the house, agreeing with the fact that Miami doesn't really have a winter. In the summer, however, the heat flux into the house becomes significantly large.

These visualizations give students clear ideas about where a house loses or gains energy the most. They can then adjust the insulation values of those weak points and run simulations to check if they have been fixed or not. Compared with just giving students some formulas or numbers to figure out what they actually mean to science and engineering practices, experiential learning like this should help students develop a true understanding of thermal conduction and insulation in the context of building science and technology.

Here is a YouTube video of the heat flux view.

Green building design with Energy3D: How big should south-facing windows be?

April 17th, 2014 by Charles Xie
Many people know that south-facing windows can help to heat a house in the winter because they let a lot of sunlight in. Exactly how much of the south-facing wall should we allocate to windows? What are the downsides? How can we avoid them? Our Energy3D software allows students to explore the problems and find the solutions.

Figure 1

Suppose we have a simple house like the one shown in Figure 1 and we are in the Boston area. Energy3D supports students to try a design choice, run a simulation, collect the data, analyze the result, and evaluate the solution -- all in real time as is shown in the video in this post. Energy3D's powerful simulation and analysis tools provide instantaneous feedback to students so that their design processes can be guided and informed by the scientific and engineering principles built in the software. Let's use the investigation of south-facing windows described above as an example.

Figure 2 (Excel graph)
Suppose a student follows the design trajectory as shown in Figure 1. A challenge is to keep the yearly energy cost needed to maintain the temperature of the house at 20℃ to be as low as possible. The student begins with adding a small window to the south side of the house. By running the seasonal energy analysis tool in Energy3D, she immediately discovers that, by adding a small window, she can cut the energy cost a bit. Then she enlarges the window and finds that more energy can be saved. So she goes on to increase the size of the window. However, she finds that, at some point, larger windows on the south side start to cost more energy. After she adds two large windows, the energy cost increases over 15%, compared with the case of no window at all. Figure 2 shows the energy cost, broken down to heater and AC, as a function of the window area. That doesn't quite make sense to her. So she has to stop and think about why.
Figure 3 (Energy3D graph)

The trend in Figure 2 suggests that, with the enlargement of windows on the south side, the cooling cost continues to rise while the heating cost levels off. A monthly breakdown in Figure 3 reveals this trend more clearly. As shown by the golden dashed line in Figure 2, the solar heating through the windows increases rapidly when their total area gets enlarged.

Figure 4 (Energy3D graph)
Figure 5 (Energy3D graph)
If she wants to keep the large window area in the south side (for natural lighting and sanity of the occupants!), she has to reduce the solar heating effect through the windows in the summer. One way to do this is to plant tall deciduous trees in front of the windows as shown in Figure 1. The trees provide shading for the windows in the summer but let sunlight shine through to the windows in the winter (in Energy3D, deciduous trees have leaves from May 1st to November 30th). Figure 4 shows the effect of the two deciduous trees on the solar gain through the two south-facing windows. From the graph, she can see that the trees cut down the solar heating in the summer. As a result, the AC cost is reduced, as shown in Figure 5, whereas the heating cost is almost unchanged.

She concludes that, with the trees planted to the south of the house, the net energy cost over a year can be decreased to lower than the case of no window at all, providing an acceptable solution that takes care of view, lighting, and landscaping.

The Energy3D graphs in this blog post show that students can keep the results of previous runs (the curve of each run is labeled by a number) and superimpose new data on top of them. As the data view can get quite complex, Energy3D provides options to turn on/off data types and runs. The embedded video shows how those features work for visualizing and analyzing the simulation results.

PS: Some readers may notice that our calculations predict higher AC cost in September than in August or July. This is because when those calculations were done, the house had no window on the east or west side. Adding windows to those sides, the AC cost will peak around July or August -- even when the trees are not present.

Building performance analyses in Energy3D

April 6th, 2014 by Charles Xie
Energy3D (Tree image credit: SketchUp Warehouse and Ethan McElroy)
A zero-energy building is a building with zero net energy consumption over a year. In other words, the total amount of energy used by the building on an annual basis is equal to or even less than the amount of renewable energy it produces through solar panels or wind turbines. A building that produces more renewable energy than it consumes over the course of a year is sometimes also called an energy-plus building. Highly energy-efficient buildings hold a crucial key to a sustainable future.

One of the goals of our Energy3D software is to provide a powerful software environment that students can use to learn about how to build a sustainable world (or understand what it takes to build such a world). Energy3D is unique because it is based on computational building physics, done in real time to produce interesting heat map visualization resembling infrared thermography. The connections to basic science concepts such as heat and temperature make the tool widely applicable in schools. Furthermore, at a time when teachers are required by the new science standards to teach basic engineering concepts and skills in classrooms, this tool may be even more relevant and useful. The easy-to-use user interface enables students to rapidly sketch up buildings of various shapes, creating a deep design space that provides many opportunities of exploration, inquiry, and learning.

In the latest version of Energy3D (Version 3.0), students can compute the energy gains, losses, and usages of a building over the course of a year. These data can be used to analyze the energy performance of the building under design. These results can help students decide their next steps in a complex design project. Without these simulation data to rationalize design choices, students' design processes would be speculative or random.

A complex engineering design project usually has many elements and variables. Supporting students to investigate each individual element or variable is key to helping them develop an understanding of the related concept. Situating this investigation in a design project enables students to explore the role of each concept on system performance. With the analytic tools in Energy3D, students can pick an individual building component such as a window or a solar panel and then analyze its energy performance. This kind of analysis can help students determine, for example, where a solar panel should be installed and which direction it should face. The video in this post shows how these analytic tools in Energy3D work.

Spring is here, let there be trees!

March 28th, 2014 by Charles Xie
Trees in Energy3D.




SimBuilding funded by the National Science Foundation

July 28th, 2013 by Charles Xie
A thermal bridge simulation in SimBuilding



Significant gender differences found (confirmed?) in CAD research

March 13th, 2013 by Charles Xie
A student design


A design timeline (click to enlarge)

Summary of the results

For more information about this research project, visit:

Using Energy2D to simulate Trombe walls

February 26th, 2013 by Charles Xie

A Trombe wall is a sun-facing wall separated from the outdoors by glass and an air space. It consists a solar absorber (such as a dark surface) and two vents for air in the house to circulate through the space and carry the solar heat to warm the house up. In a way, a Trombe wall is like a machine that uses air as a convey belt of thermal energy harvested from the sun. Trombe walls are very simple and easy to make and are sometimes used in passive solar green buildings.

Hiding sophisticated power of computational fluid dynamics behind a simple graphical user interface, our Energy2D software can easily simulate how a Trombe wall works. The two images in this blog post show screenshots of a Trombe wall simulation and its closeup version. You can play the simulation on this page and download the models there. If you open the models using Energy2D, you should be able to see how easy it is to tweak the models and create realistic heat flow simulations.

Solar chimneys operate based on similar principles. Energy2D should be able to simulate solar chimneys as well. Perhaps this would be a good challenge to you. (I will post a solar chimney simulation later if I figure out how to do it.)

Designing solar hot air collectors

September 1st, 2011 by Charles Xie








