Towards an overheating risk tool for building design

Purpose – The work set out to design and develop an overheating risk tool using the UKCP09 climate projections that is compatible with building performance simulation software. The aim of the tool is to exploit the Weather Generator and give a reasonably accurate assessment of a building's performance in future climates, without adding significant time, cost or complexity to the design team's work.Methodology/approach – Because simulating every possible future climate is impracticable, the approach adopted was to use principal component analysis to give a statistically rigorous simplification of the climate projections. The perceptions and requirements of potential users were assessed through surveys, interviews and focus groups.Findings – It is possible to convert a single dynamic simulation output into many hundreds of simulation results at hourly resolution for equally probable climates, giving a population of outcomes for the performance of a specific building in a future climate, thus helping the use...