Energy simulation for decision support in early architectural design

Abstract

Decisions made in the earliest stage of architectural design have the greatest impacts on the environmental and financial performance of buildings. Yet despite being one of the largest contributors to energy consumption and cost, building services are rarely a driving influence in the conceptualisation of architectural form.If building professionals are to engage in sustainable design practices, they must be able to assess the performance impacts of different design options prior to major architectural characteristics becoming fixed. Current modelling and simulation tools, however, largely lack the capacity to resolve design and performance constraints simultaneously. New digital tools and processes for exploring the interdependencies between architecture, building services and energy consumption in early design are needed, so that individual professionals can understand the impacts of their decisions on those of other disciplines and on building performance.In response to this problem, this thesis proposes a framework for performance-oriented design that supports integrated decision-making by enabling architects and engineers to work together to simulate and evaluate the energy performance of design alternatives early on. Arguing the need to work across disciplinary boundaries, it demonstrates how cross-cutting performance objectives can better structure and streamline the integration between design and analysis tasks by establishing a shared basis for communication. Guided by an embedded-practice research methodology, this thesis draws on firsthand experience of multidisciplinary practice to identify the limitations of current tools and processes in supporting performance-oriented investigations, and establishes common goals and principles for an integrated energy-oriented design strategy. It then describes a collaborative tool for energy design and analysis that has been developed as a critical response to observed shortcomings, which provides decision support by permitting practitioners to quickly, flexibly and reliably assess the performance of multiple design options early on.Central to this research is the understanding that there is a need to unify the disparate methods of working that have been adopted by architects and engineers as a result of progressive specialisation within the building industry. This understanding suggests that there is more to the design process than simply data exchanges supported by a common building representation, and points to the importance of communication networks that strengthen the dialogue between architect and engineer. In responding to this finding, the proposed framework facilitates the sharing of knowledge across disciplines, which is of as great a benefit to the design process as the performance evaluation capabilities that it also provides. Principal Supervisor:Professor Journal ArticlesToth, B., Janssen, P., Stouffs, R. Conference PapersJanssen, P., Stouffs, R., Chaszar, A., Boeykens, S., & Toth, B. (2014). Custom digital workflows with user-defined dat...

UQ eSpace

“…Manual adjustments had to be made to fix the windows, floors, ceilings and certain surfaces. A recommendation from the experiment and other sources with similar experiments [11,13,28,29] was to create the BIM models with the thought of BEM criteria in mind which may be in the form of requesting that the architect and engineers include certain information in specific places from the early project design stages [38].…”