Engineering assessment made easy: the 'Energysave' approach.

Whilst naturally ventilated buildings are currently considered to be the ideal solution to low energy design there remain a large proportion of buildings for which air conditioning offers the only practical solution. This project is intended to provide a means to assess design options for such buildings at a very early stage in the design and in particular address the selection of the most appropriate system. The form of the interface is still developing and while it has been demonstrated to designers no third party tests have yet been carried out. This paper reports on a project that aims to show that a general description of the building can be used to generate sufficient data to drive a valid analysis using a detailed thermal model at the early sketch stage of the design process. It describes the philosophy, methodology and the interface developed to achieve this aim. The interface guides the user through the input process using a series of screens giving options for keywords used to describe the building; comprehensive default data built into the software are then attached to these keywords. The resulting data file is a building description that is the best possible interpretation of the design intent. This can then be used to assess options and guide towards a final design