Building & Climate
Harmonizing Architecture and Climate: Unlocking the Synergy of Buildings and the Natural Environment
Most modern buildings are no longer monolithic systems that exist independently of the environment. Due to influences such as wind, solar radiation and energy exchange, their interactions extend to neighboring buildings and the space between. Today buildings are designed with awareness of climatic conditions and often allow zones of smooth transitions between the inner parts of the building and the outdoors.
Building Interface.
Modern buildings are no longer isolated structures, but rather integrated systems that seamlessly connect indoor and outdoor spaces. Understanding the microclimate in these transition zones requires considering 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 offers a wide range of calculation routines to estimate energy and exchange conditions at the interface of open spaces 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 enables a thorough understanding of energy and exchange processes at the building-environment interface.
Linking with BES.
Zooming deeper into the energy dynamics of a building for analysis such as heating or cooling loads, ventilation rates or optimisation of indoor design, other software systems come into play. ENVI-met provides localized microclimate data at the facades 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
The facade and the roof constitute the interface between the indoor and the outdoor urban world. Both are directly connected through the energy exchange processes taking place at the building facades and roofs. ENVI-met allows an in-depth analysis of this complex system and empowers the user to find the best solution for both the indoor and the outdoor climate.
Interface Analysis.
The façade and roof of a building are vital interfaces between the outdoor climate and indoor building 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 outdoors. Through high-resolution simulation, ENVI-met enables a thorough analysis of façade temperatures, optimizing the energy efficiency of buildings while considering the impact on outdoor thermal comfort conditions.
Greening Systems.
A wide range of possible techniques is available to add a layer of vegetation to facades or roofs of buildings. ENVI-met supports a detailed numerical simulation of different greening systems including the simulation of radiation and heat transfer through the greening layer or the calculation of substrate evaporation and temperature.
Interactive visualisation
Using LEONARDO, you can interactively explore and analyse the energy exchange processes at the building surface or heat transfers from / to the inner parts of the building. Data can be visualized using the integrated chart editor or be sent to DataStudio to be further processed using 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.
