Visualisation tool to estimate the effect of design parameters on the heating energy demand in the early design phases

To date powerful dynamic simulation tools are available to estimate the energy consumption in buildings. However, these require a lot of input and generate a large amount of output data. This output has to be filtered to select relevant results for early design phases. As a consequence, early design decisions regarding energy efficiency are in practice often based on architects’ experience or intuition. As architects think in a graphical way, this paper proposes a tool to visualise the effect of decisions on the heating energy demand, based on the developed “dynamic Equivalent Degree Day method”. Using a macro, this tool generates automatically parameter combinations, calculates the energy use and represents results graphically. Relevant sketch design parameters can be manipulated graphically such as the thermal compactness, insulation level, the effective use of direct and indirect solar gains, internal gains including occupant presence and activities, and global ventilation strategies. It is expected that energy demand visualisation can improve the integration of energy efficient design into the architectural process from the sketch design stage onwards. In addition, visualisation is a powerful communication tool for architects to share information and ideas with other architects, engineers, stakeholders and users towards realising Nearly Zero Energy Buildings. The approach is elaborated for the Belgian context, but can be applied to other contexts.status: publishe