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.
v8.2.7 [Oct 6, 2014]
Core changes to EnergyPlus:
- Internal simulation engine code translated from FORTRAN to C to spur the evolution of EnergyPlus through:
- Improved interaction with a larger community through a more popular code base, and improved access to code libraries for performance and enhanced capabilities.
- Language change initially caused a slightly slower codebase due to translation overhead, however several restructuring efforts in the code eventually led to EnergyPlus v8.2 being faster than v8.1 in many tests cases.
- Development transitioned to GitHub, where the source code is to be made fully public in the spirit of the open source license.
General:
- Bug fixes throughout.
Building Envelope:
- Integrated slab calculations now allow improved simulation of ground heat transfer.
HVAC/Plant:
- Improved sizing algorithm for including fan heat in cooling coil calculations.
- Improved sizing input options for scaling autosized values.
- Additional plant load dispatch algorithms based on meeting component part-loading targets.
- New models for single-sided natural ventilation with multiple openings.
- New on/off fan option for unit heater and unit ventilator.
- New fault model for coil fouling.
- DOAS direct to zonal water-to-air heat pumps.
- Expanded support for table lookup for plant equipment performance.
- New zone air mass flow balance option (partially link HVAC flows with zone mixing and infiltration).
Utilities:
- Ice storage curve-fit tool.
- Windows 7 - 64-bit version (32-bit may be available via Helpdesk).
- Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 and compatible) - 64-bit version (32-bit may be available via Helpdesk).
- Mac OSX 10.9 - 64-bit version.
- EnergyPlus 8.2.0 has been tested on all these platforms.
- EnergyPlus does intensive computations, and based on configuration, can write massive amounts of data to disk. For best performance, computers should have a substantial amount of memory and high speed hard drives.
Mall Creeps
