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 will enable us to move from energy requirements to consumption. To do this, it is necessary to integrate not only production, but also regulation, distribution and emission efficiencies.

SED (dynamic energy 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 the project's energy consumption with sufficient precision.

With its concrete results, the SED provides a quantified assessment of the options selected. It provides a concrete response to an assessment that remained intuitive.

The SED tool models buildings and measures the impact of each construction parameter on the energy performance of the building. This tool has become indispensable for designing new buildings or renovating them to achieve high energy performance.

The various modelling stages are as follows:

• building the geometric model ;

• 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, ventilation and domestic hot water equipment;

• assumptions of use, occupancy, equipment, lighting ;

• assumptions about opening and vacation periods ;

• assumptions on internal heat inputs (occupants, lighting, specific equipment, etc.).

The results of a dynamic thermal simulation are as follows:

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

• heating or cooling capacity required ;

• annual consumption of equipment and building ;

• source of energy ;

• comprehensive weather data.

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