Building energy software tools and energy consumption

Thermal modeling tools are now an essential part of environmental project design.

Indeed, we have gone from an era when the environmental parts of projects were justified with pages of text to an era of justification where calculation pages have replaced them.

Thermal simulation enables you to estimate a project's energy requirements (heating and cooling) as a function of its geometry, physical characteristics (insulation, inertia, type of joinery, etc.) and location.

Depending on the tools used, if it is possible to model energy production, this can be used to pass from energy requirements to consumption. To do this, it is necessary to integrate not only production, but also regulation, distribution and emission efficiencies.

DTS (Dynamic Thermal Simulation) can therefore be used at several stages of a project's development, from the sketch stage to validate a project design, to the PRO stage to calculate a project's energy consumption fairly precisely.

Through its concrete results, STD provides a quantified assessment of the options selected. It therefore provides a concrete response to an evaluation that was still intuitive.

The STD tool is used to model buildings and measure the impact of each construction parameter on the building's energy performance. This tool has become indispensable for designing new buildings or renovating them to achieve high energy performance.

The various modelling stages are as follows:

• geometric model construction ;

• interaction with the environment, annual weather file ;

• material data for all elements of the geometric model, façade, roof, basement, interior elements, structure (taking into account building inertia), etc. ;

• definition of heating, cooling and ventilation equipment;

• assumptions of use, occupancy, equipment, lighting.

The results of dynamic thermal simulation :

• hour-by-hour temperature trends for each zone of the building over the year ;

• heating or cooling capacity required ;

• annual consumption of equipment and building ;

• source of energy ;

• comprehensive weather data.

Based on these results, STD can be used to carry out various technical feasibility studies, comparing the technical solutions to be implemented on a building (envelope, insulation, joinery, treatment...