Integration and interoperability of building envelope information and energy modeling

Different methods can be adopted in order to reduce the energy consumption in buildings, which contribute to about 40% of total annual energy consumption in the U.S. The following three major approaches were considered in this study: evaluation of buildings during the design phase and pre-construction phase, energy retrofit of existing buildings, and energy monitoring of buildings. Building envelope components are among the elements in a building that can be improved or monitored for better energy performance in all three approaches mentioned above. Building envelope components considered in this study include both opaque and transparent components such as walls, roofs, floors, windows, and doors, which contribute to heat transfer in a building. Building Energy Modeling (BEM) and analysis is one of the major tools contributing in energy conservation measures by providing users with data related to energy consumption of buildings. Therefore, improving different elements of BEM including the energy modeling process, obtaining outputs, and quality of outputs can be beneficial in energy conservation field. This study is focused on improving these elements and the BEM process by expediting the whole process, making it more accurate by minimizing human interaction, and increasing the level of details of energy-related outputs. It can facilitate and increase the accuracy of building’s energy evaluation during design phase, energy retrofit decision-making process, and energy monitoring. A platform is developed to automate BEM, which provides users with detailed information on the amount of heat transfer through building envelope components. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is adopted to facilitate the automation in modeling process. The developed tool is capable of 1) reading a BIM file, 2) correcting some information within the file, 3) automatically convert the BIM file to a file format, which is suitable for energy simulation, and 4) automatically perform energy simulation and generate text files containing detailed heat transfer data through every single building envelope component. The first task is limited to gbXML file format, followed by a corrective tool developed using Python, which receives the BIM file and performs some corrections on data related to building envelope components such as doors and floors. Next, a code is developed in Ruby to use the pre-defined functions within OpenStudio source code in order to convert the gbXML file to IDF file. Since, this research is focused on building envelope, the issues and missing data related to other systems such as HVAC are resolved and added manually. The final task is carried out using modified source code of EnergyPlus, which receives the generated IDF file and performs energy simulation to generate five text files for walls, floors, roofs, windows, and doors. These files contain the detailed and fine-grained information on the amount of heat transfer through each component as opposed to accumulative data for each thermal zone or whole-house energy consumption.