Investigating the Efficiency of Building Energy Simulation Software on Architectural Design Process

Abstract

New designing techniques are used recently during the design phases of buildings to adapt the environment and achieve human thermal comfort, one of these designing techniques is using energy simulation software's. However, architects need to understand the capabilities of these software's and its operation systems, when it comes to designing and modelling passive buildings. Moreover the validity of the design outcomes which is the main concern of this research. These energy simulation software's helps architects to estimate the building's energy efficiency in order to achieve human thermal comfort. This study will focus on studding and analyzing one of the well-known simulation software's used for building's energy simulations which is called "Design-Builder". The presented research will measure the accuracy of Design-Builder outcomes by comparing the accuracy of the thermal simulation in Design-Builder software to the results obtained from the experimental data. A Bookstore kiosk located in El-Sherouk city, Cairo, Egypt was chosen to be the study area of this research. The research will compare the simulation results of this Kiosk to the field's experimental measurements obtained from site visit. The results reveled that there is differences between the field measurements and the simulation ranged between 1 to 5°C. The study analyzed the causes of these differences and provided some proposals to improve Design-Builder software in order to provide more accurate data in simulating hot arid climates.