Thursday 13th of February 2014 – 9am-4pm, SDG&E Energy Innovation Center (EIC), 4760 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, San Diego
In California, retrofitting buildings with natural ventilation offers the most potential for reducing energy costs and CO2 emissions associated with cooling. This one-day training session discusses how the new wind-driven natural ventilation modeling capabilities of EnergyPlus can be used to identify and quantify opportunities to implement natural ventilation in new and retrofit commercial building designs. EnergyPlus will be used to study questions such as how many operable windows are needed for a given space and what is the optimal arrangement for either cross ventilation or single-sided ventilation. Building geometry input and results visualization will be based on the recently released Simergy free EnergyPlus graphical interface.
Target audience
The target audiences for this course are design professionals (e.g., HVAC engineers, simulation consultants and architects with an interest in thermal simulation) as well as utility program managers.
Course structure
The course starts with a brief introduction to EnergyPlus and the Simergy interface, allowing for the participation of inexperienced users. The afternoon session introduces the new EnergyPlus natural ventilation modeling capabilities through a set of simple design exercises. The course will be taught by Spencer Dutton and Guilherme Graça. Spencer works in the Commercial Building Systems Group and the Simulation Research Group at LBNL. Guilherme is a building energy consultant that has carried out EnergyPlus modeling studies of the San Francisco Federal Office Building, the San Diego Children’s Museum, the New York Times HQ building among others.
What you need
Attendees must bring a laptop with Simergy and EnergyPlus 7.2 installed. For San Francisco please confirm attendance using the email (
natventtrainingsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). For Irwindale and San Diego: online application (please see SCE and SDG&E websites).