Not Sure if it's Cool or Nerdy

First, I build the building forms. I get the window and wall sizes right - which both are pretty critical for solar fenestration. I'm not very strict on space height and width. Although it is good to have them all as close to being perfect. Nonetheless, it should be fine as long I think the built model is sufficiently representative of the building design.

Preliminary Development

Next thing in line is to set up the building parameters - internal and external. I like to separate the internal factors into two categories: architectural and mechanical. These two categories cover factors such as building materials, surface finishes, materials specifications, air conditioning systems requirements, internal load which covers space operations, human factor, etc.

To put simply, I give a sort of an educated guess that the building shall be occupied by a cetain amount of people on daily basis through typical office hours at which they will enjoy nice cool space in a building that is built of standard brickwall and tinted windows.

I hope that is simple enough.

Detailed Design

Now the boring part is over, we can continue to the more depressing part of this exercise - running simulation. Basically, it's pretty easy - because all I have to do is, assuming all settings are defaulted, click a button.

Let's have an example - simulating daylight.

To make my life a little bit more difficult, I set my own sky model - what kind of sky I would like to have for my model. I mean, sure I'll have the local sky condition but I need to set whether it's during the brightest day of the year or the dark gloomy sky we have right after a heavy rain. Then I set the time and date of which I would like to have my data.

Simple stuffs. Even a monkey could do it.

Simulation Output

Now, I have all the data that I supposedly need and like any profession that deals with ridiculous amount of numbers, how we intepret and present them is arguably the most important matter of all. Hence, I make them look nicer and easier for general understanding.

For example, image below shows in a typical bedroom floor plan of a residential unit, the level of Daylight Factor (DF) available around the interior space. In other words, how good a room can get good daylighting. Good DF should be around 1 to 5, I think.

Data Representation

I think that is simple enough to follow.

What's the point of all of this? I mean, the 'how' is not as important as 'why' I have to do all this stuffs. We'll get into that on the next entry.

Yes, hooray! More cool stuffs are coming up!