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| Image credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT |
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Leon Glicksman, professor of building technology and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has long argued that that’s the wrong way to go about it, and that in order to come close to optimising energy use in buildings, it is essential to make those considerations part of the process from the very beginning. And so Glicksman and some of his students have been developing a simple, open-source web application that allows people to do a basic analysis of a proposed building’s energy usage in just a few minutes, making it possible to try multiple variations quickly to see what factors make the biggest difference.
The application, Design Advisor, has been available online for about five years, but just recently received its most significant upgrade. Previously, the software would only analyse an individual floor of a building, but a new component adds an analysis of the roof. Now, the resulting data give a relatively complete picture of the entire building’s likely energy needs and performance, and the comfort of its occupants in different parts of a room and at different times of the day and in different seasons.
While many architectural firms use sophisticated software to perform more detailed analyses of buildings they design, these programs require much more extensive training and knowledge and take longer to use. Comparisons the team made between the leading programs and Design Advisor have shown good agreement in the results produced, to within about 10 per cent, confirming the utility of the new tool. Detailed charts of these comparisons are available on the Design Advisor Web site so that users can evaluate the accuracy for themselves.
To read more, visit
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/green-blueprints-0224.html |
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