Building & Climate
Harmonizing Architecture and Climate: Unlocking the Synergy of Buildings and the Natural Environment
Building Interface.
Modern buildings are no longer isolated structures, but integrated systems that seamlessly connect indoor and outdoor spaces. Understanding the microclimate in these transition zones requires consideration of the dynamics of both the indoor and outdoor environments. ENVI-met software facilitates this analysis, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of the interface between buildings and their surroundings.
Energy and Exchange.
ENVI-met provides a wide range of calculation routines for estimating energy and exchange conditions at the interface between outdoor and indoor environments. By accurately assessing these dynamics, it provides valuable insights into the interactions and influences between the indoor and outdoor systems. Through its advanced capabilities, ENVI-met software provides a thorough understanding of energy and exchange processes at the interface between buildings and the environment.
Linking with BES.
To drill down into the energy dynamics of a building for analyses such as heating or cooling loads, ventilation rates, or optimization of interior design, other software systems come into play. ENVI-met provides localized facade microclimate data for selected or all buildings in the urban domain as input data for other building energy models such as Energy Plus.
Insights into Energy and Exchange Dynamics: High-Resolution Case Study
Estimation of the energy and exchange processes between open space and indoor environment
A group of buildings, together with urban surroundings such as green areas and traffic infrastructure, form a complex and dynamic landscape.
In order to understand the contribution of individual buildings to the urban microclimate system and to assess the energy exchange between the interior of the building and the outside microclimate, all these elements must be accounted for an integrated simulation framework.
The holistic and high-resolution approach of ENVI-met allows you to simulate the microscale urban metabolism as a complex system as well as the energy fluxes at the façade scale of a single building.
Controlling the interface: Analyse and optimize energy exchange processes
Interface Analysis.
A building’s facade and roof are critical interfaces between the outdoor climate and the building’s interior physics. The materials used in these elements play a crucial role in determining how absorbed radiation is either transferred as heat into the building or remains outside. Through high-resolution simulation, ENVI-met enables a thorough analysis of facade temperatures, optimizing the energy efficiency of buildings while considering the impact on outdoor thermal comfort conditions.
Greening Systems.
There is a wide range of possible techniques for adding a vegetation layer to building facades or roofs. ENVI-met supports a detailed numerical simulation of different vegetation systems, including the simulation of radiation and heat transfer through the vegetation layer or the calculation of substrate evaporation and temperature.
Interactive visualisation
With LEONARDO, you can interactively explore and analyze energy exchange processes at the building surface or heat transfer to/from the building interior. Data can be visualized with the integrated graph editor or sent to DataStudio for further processing with Python scripts.
Exploring Façade Temperature and Wind Speed Patterns: High-Resolution Case Study
High-resolution simulation of façade temperatures and wind speed patterns
The trend towards urbanization has made it increasingly important to study the impact of urban climate on thermal warming at a regional and global scale, as well as on the impact on the energy consumption of buildings.
With ENVI-met you can analyze the energy performance of each building in the model domain in parallel with the calculation of the outdoor microclimate conditions.
As wind and sun are the primary factors controlling the thermodynamics of a surface and the distribution of heat, the building model is directly coupled to the outdoor fluid dynamics model, providing detailed wind data for each second of the day and for each wall and façade segment of the building.
