Abstract
There is an urgent need for energy efficiency in buildings within the European framework, considering its environmental implications, and Europe’s energy dependence. Furthermore, the need for enhancing and increasing productivity in the building industry turns new technologies and building energy performance simulation environments into extremely interesting solutions towards rigorous analysis and decision making in renovation within acceptable risk levels. The present work describes a multidisciplinary approach for the estimation of the energy performance of an educational building. The research involved data acquisition with advanced geomatic tools, the development of an optimized building information model, and energy assessment in Building Performance Simulation (BPS) software. Interoperability issues were observed in the different steps of the process. The inspection and diagnostic phases were conducted in a timely, accurate manner thanks to automated data acquisition and subsequent analysis using Building Information Modeling based tools (BIM-based tools). Energy simulation was performed using Design Builder, and the results obtained were compared with those yielded by the official software tool established by Spanish regulations for energy certification. The discrepancies between the results of both programs have proven that the official software program is conservative in this sense. This may cause the depreciation of the assessed buildings.
Highlights
In the European Union, buildings accounted for 40% of total energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in 2012 [1,2,3]
The most widely used Building Performance Simulation (BPS) tools include Integrated Environmental Solutions-Virtual Environmental (IES-VE) [29], an integrated building simulation program which carries out energy analyses in different modules
The QUick Energy Simulation Tool combines a building creation wizard, an energy efficiency measure wizard, and a simulation engine based on the software Department of Energy of the USA-2 (DOE-2) [30]
Summary
In the European Union, buildings accounted for 40% of total energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in 2012 [1,2,3]. The use of BIM tools is still infrequent in the field of energy efficiency, and even more when it comes to modeling and renovating existing buildings. 3D laser scanners provide very high acquisition rates, acceptable accuracy and significant savings in field work These non-destructive, non-contact devices allow to collect geometric information from all sorts of facilities and structures, under construction or renovation, avoiding damage or modification [18,19]. The combined use of BIM and BPS tools is even more limited in the case of existing buildings In such cases, application is generally more complex due to the frequent lack of information regarding the building elements and the energy performance of electrical systems.
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