Simulate building energy and model water use in buildings and energy consumption used for heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting. Simulate conditioned and unconditioned spaces, view heat balance-based solutions of radiant and convective effects. Use multiple built-in HVAC and lighting control strategies and view standard summary and detailed output reports.
A building is a real ecosystem of its own if you consider all energy flows going around. You need to keep it warm during winter and keep it cool during summer; you need to illuminate it, ventilate it, and so on. The challenge is clear: you need to provide all those services in the most efficient way and at the minimum cost. EnergyPlus - developed by the US Department of Energy - is an application designed to create simulations of buildings and all the energy flows inside of them, so that you can design them in the best way to accomplish your goals.
Since EnergyPlus is focused on the simulation engine and not on the interface and accessory tools. The application “speaks” the .txt language, meaning that it receives data from text files and produces results and reports as text files as well. If you are counting on a user-friendly interface, you can wait for a while until one of the on-going interface development projects finishes. There are also some extra tools you can use in combination with EnergyPlus - these projects come from the private sector so you may expect to have to pay a license for them. Speaking of licensing, EnergyPlus offers different types of licenses depending on the use it is going to be given. There are commercial licenses and non-commercial licenses. In turn, within the commercial licenses you will find end-user license (free of charge) and distribution license (you need to pay for the license).
EnergyPlus package includes the following two tools: IDF Editor and EP-Lauch, which you can use for creating, editing, and running input files. EnergyPlus Example File Generator is another tool which is under testing. It is a web-based application to help you in creating input files for EnergyPlus (remember, they are .txt files) for small and simple buildings; the files, once created, are sent to you by e-mail.
v7.0.26 [Nov 23, 2011]
Significant speed increases, most simulations see up to 20% reduction in execution time, depending on features used.
New input data sets for HVAC equipment performance for rooftop packaged air conditioners and heat pumps.
Extended the library of refrigerant data to include R407a and superheated CO2 properties.
New input data set for exhaust-fired chiller heater model.
Steam is now a "built-in" fluid property.
Zone Floor Area can be an input—overrides the calculated amount.
International Glazing Data Base (IGDB) full spectral data can be used directly.
Shadowing Model new options: legacy "convex" Weiler-Atherton or Sutherland-Hodgman (more robust for non-convex surfaces).
New input problem checks for surface geometry including: convexity, collinear vertices, planar surfaces, and flipped floors/roofs. For flipped floors/roofs, a fix is attempted.
Conduction Transfer Function model revised to improve modeling of mass-less material layers.
OtherSideCoefficients model extended to provide controlled surface outside temperature with schedule and limits.
Design day weather data generation procedures upgraded for clear sky model and wet-bulb temperature profiles.
Conduction Finite Difference heat transfer model now includes options for solution method and to control node spatial resolution, relaxation factor, and convergence criteria.
Improved convergence checks for initial warmup days.
AirflowNetwork solver enhanced for speed.
Consolidated outdoor air inputs in HVAC models to common design object wherever outdoor air rates are specified.
New proportional control for CO2-based demand controlled ventilation.
New mixing object for door openings into refrigerated zones.
New mechanical ventilation controls based on ASHRAE Standard 62.1 and CEN 15251.
New model for Variable Refrigerant Flow heat pump air conditioning systems.
Ideal loads air system model revised to include outdoor air and economizer controls, humidity control, and capacity limits.
Plant system and component models revised to improve speed and robustness, model fluid properties as a function of temperature and alternative types of fluid, and better flow control.
Glycol mixtures supported in all plant loop components.
New dual duct air terminal unit with dedicated outside air system on one duct and cooling on the other duct.
New absorption chiller model powered by microturbine generator exhaust.
Eliminated redundant input fields in compound HVAC objects.
Added maximum limits for supply air temperature leaving air terminal reheat coils.
Radiant-based HVAC system models revised for significant speed increase when models have a large number of thermal zones.
Low temperature radiant zone HVAC model now includes a "variable off" control mode.
Simple chilled water coil model has enhanced autosizing and variable UA for significant improvements in chilled water flow rate calculations.
New heat transfer models for buried piping systems include interaction with building slabs and basement walls.
Hot water boiler model options for choosing between entering and leaving water temperature as basis in performance curves.
New dedicated outdoor air system HVACTemplate object.
New HVACTemplate options: static pressure reset fan curve, screw chiller type, economizer dewpoint limit, and unitary system design supply temperatures.
New Refrigeration model for cold-storage thermal zones served by refrigeration-based zone units.
Refrigeration condensers now can reject heat to a thermal zone.
Improved Refrigeration model to compare the available temperature of heat reclaimed from a refrigeration condenser to the temperature needed.
Variable speed fan model upgraded to avoid unrealistic leaving temperatures at very low flow rates.
New model for chemical battery electrical storage.
Availability Managers extended to work with selected ZoneHVAC equipment including: window air conditioner, unit heater, unit ventilator, packaged terminal air conditioner, packaged terminal heat pump, and zone water source heat pump.
New Setpoint Managers added to: follow outdoor air temperature, follow system node temperature, and follow ground temperature.
Improvements made to how zone equipment is controlled when sequencing multiple devices in a single zone.
New overcool option for Zone and AirLoop HVAC to control high humidity by shifting down the zone cooling setpoint temperature.
Added high humidity control option for air-to-air and water-to-air heat pumps.
New EMS actuators and calling point for custom autosizing of input fields in select DX air handling equipment models.
New EMS actuators for material surface absorptance properties.
New EMS actuators for Variable Refrigerant Flow operating mode and terminal unit part-load ratio.
New EMS actuators for ideal loads air system supply temperature and humidity ratio.
EnergyPlus Runtime Language extended to include built-in functions for generating random numbers, limited support for minus sign, and built-in variables for zone timestep and current environment period.
New thermal comfort reporting based on the adaptive comfort criteria from ASHRAE Standard 55-2010 and CEN 15251.
New Sensible Heat Gain Component tabular report.
New results in Envelope Summary and Lighting Summary tabular reports.
New source energy end use tabular report.
IDF Editor enhancements include: (1) search and replace any text in a file, (2) easy node name selection based on names, object, field, or recently used, and (3) expanded validity checking.
New auxiliary tool generates performance curve coefficients for select HVAC equipment.
CSVproc has been reimplemented and is now available as a cross-platform tool.
New EPDrawGUI cross-platform replacement of WinEPDraw.
New IDFVersionUpdater cross-platform replacement of IDFConverter.
Enhanced WeatherConverter with several new features.
EP-Launch can start EPDrawGUI, IDFVersionUpdater, and EP-Compare.
Documentation has been updated for all documents.
Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) 32 and 64 bit versions.
Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 and above, Redhat 5.4 and above) 32 and 64 bit versions.
Mac (10.5, 10.6) 32 and 64 bit versions.
EnergyPlus V 7.0 has been tested on all of these platforms.
