Thermal Modeling for Environmentally Sustainable Design

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”, and the saying is also true for buildings. To model a building is to plan and refine its performance for the future. The Tas program is one of the software platforms used by engineers and building scientists to model how a building might typically behave in any [...]

Using the excel spreadsheet to explore simple heat conduction.

I have started working on creating my own simulation of heat conduction. I hope to create an interactive flash program which the user can play with to visually and numerically see how conduction occurs in a 3 dimensional object, initially a cube. To get to grips with the basic physics of it I setup an [...]

Thermal Modeling of an Auckland House using SunREL

Using SunREL* to model a hypothetical house to see the effect of windows/glazing on solar gain, the amount of incoming solar energy into the house which leads to heating of the internal zones. To model a building you must specify all aspects of the building- its dimensions, the orientation of the walls, the positions of [...]

Heat Conduction

The following is my summary of relevant parts of a wikipedia article on Heat Conduction and other bits and pieces of information. Conduction is one of the three ways in which heat can be transferred, the other ways being convection and radiation. Conduction can simply be thought of as heat transfer by “touch”, and only can [...]

Thermal Modeling of Buildings

My introduction to eCubed Building Workshop was thermal modeling of the Albany Senior High School gymnasium (ASHS). Using architects plans of the gym and the standards set out in NZS4214:2002 I had to find thermal resistance (“R”) values for each of the building elements of the gym (walls, roofs, floors). I went very slowly at first as everything was [...]