Abstract
One of the main strategies to reduce countries’ energy bills is to invest in efficient buildings. To achieve this objective, the European Union Member States have developed different methodologies to evaluate building energy performance, which are often supported by simulation tools. These tools are based on calculation engines that use databases and simplifications to attempt to bring their results close to real building performance and are mostly designed to be used at the end of the process, neglecting their role in project decision-making processes. To compensate for this situation and to obtain the most accurate results, the methodologies recommend previous work during the building design phase to adopt passive design solutions that learn from experience and aim to adapt the building design to the local climate. However, these design solutions are difficult to adopt while working with medium to large public buildings and are often not properly understood by the simulation tools. In addition, new BIM methodologies are being implemented, starting to enable proper interaction between the designer and the results, and opening up the option of introducing other types of calculations, such as building comfort, in the calculation process. Among the group of countries with limited simulation tools that are starting to be substituted is Spain, which recently launched its first BIM-based energy simulation tool. This tool aims to compensate for the limitations of the former simulation tools and opens up the option of performing comfort calculations by sharing information with other programs. The objective of this research is to evaluate, from different perspectives, the performance of this new simulation tool on three buildings at the University of Alicante. These were chosen as university campuses are responsible for large groups of buildings and belong to the group of stakeholders interested in obtaining efficient and comfortable buildings. These case studies are defined by their extreme adaptation to design recommendations for mild-warm weather. At the end of the process, the difference is measured between simulation and real building performance. The results obtained show that simulation still differs greatly from real building performance from the energy performance point of view, while the comfort evaluation shows results that are closer to the reality of the buildings.
Highlights
Energy it is obtained from ever, these results showthe high energy needs andConsumption consumptionthat in winter, especially in the following case of theformula: IU building. These results demonstrate that, in this climate area, designers are forced to balance the building design to fit mild-warm and mild-cold situations
The simulation tools can be highly useful in the process of evaluating building performance from different perspectives, but, as stated by [18], there is still a limited understanding of how to translate design into efficient buildings and a significant distance between simulation and real building performance [7,63]
It demonstrated that it yields results that are closer to reality in the case study with a design that is less adapted to the local climate, which is not the ideal situation
Summary
The search for efficient buildings is one of the main priorities of all governments to reduce energy bills. Many initiatives have been developed to provide regulations and tools that facilitate the process of obtaining such buildings and to help designers in the decision-making process. In the European Union (EU) in 2002, the European Commission published the first Energy Performance Building Directive (EPBD) [1] to give EU Member. States guidelines to develop mandatory regulations to improve the energy efficiency of the building market, including new and existing buildings. This directive has been periodically updated, introducing different factors, such as zero-energy buildings and the recovery of the investment in measures to improve buildings’ energy performance [2]
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