Improving Energy Efficiency in Building through Automated Computer Design Process

Passive solar heating and light control have been traditionally accomplished through simple rules that matured to shape vernacular architecture. Although many more issues were addressed, the comfort level in terms of thermal energy as well as light control, were key issues in traditional buildings. New materials and techniques altered the balances, setting the use of new types of energy as essential parts of modern design. The power of modern technology, though applied toward the use of materials to generate viable enclosures, it has not been used to its full potential toward the efficient use of solar energy and against the dependency of commercially available energy. The use of computers aiding us toward design has been limited in practice to electronic drafting or modeling [Aish, 2000]. Other than the recently developed packages like Ecotect that integrates to commercially available Computer Aided Design (CAD) software, relatively minimal was the work done toward aiding a designer to energy consumption in a visually responsive interface. In order to facilitate the designer in an efficient manner, an algorithm that seamlessly works within commercially available CAD/BIM packages has been developed. The developed program has the advantage of generating an initial input by itself into the CAD interface instead of retroactively evaluating a pre-existing form that the designer has already generated. It determines the optimum openings and shading devices for a given space at any specific latitude and interactively generates virtual models for the user. The main issues addressed are thermal comfort and light control. Although it is not anticipated that passive solar control will provide thermal comfort under all possible scenarios, the algorithm offers optimum use of solar energy.