| Aldo Leopold Foundation Energy System Concept Analysis and Design | |
| In
2004, the Wisconsin based Aldo Leopold Foundation began work on constructing a
“Legacy Center” whose express goal was to be the most energy efficiency
building in the United States. TESS carried out simulation work of various
proposed designs and worked closely with the building owner, architect and
building commissioner so that simulation results would inform the design of
innovative features such as natural ventilation, earth tubes, and unconditioned
transition spaces. The Aldo Leopold Foundation is seeking the US Green Building
Council’s LEED TM Platinum rating for their building. |
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| Built Environment Air Tightness | |
| The objective of this study is to investigate the impact
of envelope airtightness on the energy consumption of typical commercial buildings in the U.S. Despite common
assumptions that envelope air leakage is not significant in office and other commercial buildings, measurements
have shown that these buildings are subject to larger infiltration rates than commonly believed (Persily 1998,
Proskiw and Phillips 2001). Infiltration in commercial buildings can have many negative consequences, including
reduced thermal comfort, interference with the proper operation of mechanical ventilation systems, degraded
indoor air quality, moisture damage of building envelope components, and increased energy consumption. For these
reasons, attention has been given to methods of improving airtightness both in existing buildings and new constructions
(Persily 1993). Since 1997, the Building Environment and Thermal Envelope Council of the National Institute of Building
Sciences has sponsored several symposia in the U.S. on the topic of air barriers for buildings in North American climates.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has sponsored similar conferences in Canada. Others have also published articles
on the importance of air leakage in commercial buildings (Anis 2001, Ask 2003). However, the focus of these conferences
and publications has largely been air barrier technology and the non-energy impacts of air leakage in buildings. In order
to evaluate the cost effectiveness of such measures to tighten buildings, estimates of the impact of air leakage on energy
use are needed. |
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| Duckworth Residence Energy System Concept Analysis and Design | |
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No description yet available. |
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| Milwaukee Public Market Solar Shading Analysis | |
| The Kubala Washatko Architects designed and are constructing
a marketplace in Milwaukee’s historic 3rd ward district. The district is unquestionably urban with a major highway
passing through on an overpass and yet one of the building’s design intents was that it have an outdoor market feel to it.
To this end, much of the façade was glass, including a large, unobstructed west facing element. Thermal Energy System
Specialists carried out a solar analysis to verify whether the façade’s shading elements were performing as intended and
to give the system design engineer information on the building’s solar loads. |
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| Natural Ventilation Simulation and Study of the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center | |
| Thermal whole building energy
analysis is a fairly mature field of study. Recently, however, increasing effort has
been put into the improvement of air flow modeling techniques and more specifically
into the integration of air flow modeling into whole building thermal energy analysis.
One of the goals of these tools is to make it possible to assess the energy benefits
of natural ventilation in buildings. TESS is currently carrying out a measurement and verification
project on the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to model the natural
ventilation strategies that were implemented in the auditorium, office space and conference
room of the building. With a benchmarked model in hand, it will then possible to investigate
how the three spaces could have been better designed to enhance energy conservation through
natural ventilation. The study also involves the modeling, measurement and verification of
the 10 kW photovoltaic array on the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center. |
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| Drake Landing Solar Community, Okotoks, Alberta, Canada | |
| The first community in the world that
is designed to have 90% of the annual heating load met by solar energy is now being built
outside of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Relying on energy efficient home construction, rows
of solar collectors (800 in all) mounted on garage roofs, two large short-term storage
tanks (30,000 gallons each), and a series of 144 bores drilled into the ground for long-term
storage, this innovative “solar seasonal storage” project provides a fascinating look at how
solar heating can prove feasible on a community-sized project. We’ve modeled the entire solar
heating system in TRNSYS and are able to provide team members with detailed projections
(temperatures, energy flows etc. on a 1-minute basis for 50 years) on the performance of the
system. Optimization analyses have allowed us to select the ideal distribution of solar
collectors, boreholes, and storage tank size that maximizes the performance while staying within
the constraints of the project (budget, available land area, available roof area etc.). Modeling
and simulation of this system have resulted in an increase of performance by 15%. Click here to download the project profile. |
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| O'Neil Residence Energy System Concept Analysis and Design | |
| TESS provided energy modeling
services to the New York office of Atelier 10, a leading environmental design firm.
This project sought first to drastically reduce the need for mechanical heating and
cooling in a Philadelphia based single family residence and then to evaluate potential
space conditioning systems to meet those reduced requirements. After evaluating the
envelope and passive solar design of the residence, TESS modeled a ground coupled heat pump
system, a furnace / air conditioner system that was assisted by a solar wall and an earth duct,
a boiler-heated, water-based radiant floor system, and a solar wall heated sub-floor hypocaust
system. Click here to download the project profile. |
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| Ongoing TRNSYS Development | |
| The
TRNSYS Developers Group contracted TESS to carry out a significant revision of the TRNSYS
source code for the release of TRNSYS 16. As part of his contribution to the effort, TESS
implemented a system by which new TRNSYS components can be compiled separately and dropped
into a certain directory from which they will be loaded as the simulation launches. TESS's
TRNSYS Development work has continued with the release of TRNSYS 16. We are beginning to make
plans for the major development features of TRNSYS 17. |
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| RENEWisc : Renewable Energy System Simulation Tool Development | |
| TRNSYS includes a
powerful method of creating distributable applications in which any
desired subset of the information that describes the system can be hidden
while the remainder is displayed in an intuitive, graphical format. In
this manner a non TRNSYS user can run simulations of a complex system
while changing the values of selected parameters in order to analyze the
system themselves. TESS used this TRNSYS feature to create a freely
distributable tool that assesses the potential energy savings in a
building attained by employing any combination of photovoltaics, wind
turbines, a one or two tank solar domestic water heating system, and / or
a fuel cell. Click here for additional information on RENEWisc. |
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| Stand- Alone Hybrid Power Generation System Simulation Tool Development | |
| Many of the intricacies of developing and deploying hybrid
power generation systems that include photovoltaics, wind turbines,
hydrogen fuel cells, electrolyzers, batteries and backup generators center
on the overall control (or dispatching) strategy. When should energy
available from renewable sources be used to directly meet the load? When
should energy be used to charge the battery? When should the load be met
by energy from the battery? Should the battery be used to electrolyze
water and generate hydrogen? Under what circumstances should the fuel cell
be brought online? Should it be used to meet the load, charge the battery
or both? TESS spent over a year developing TRNSYS models of numerous
innovative control strategies for such systems. The models were built into
TRNSYS distributable applications are were used by the client to assess
system potential. Click here to download the project profile. |
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| TRNSYS - CONTAM Integration | |
| In a 1995 study to estimate the impact
of infiltration in office buildings based on a simplified method for calculating both the
infiltration flows and the building energy use, building loads were calculated for a set of 25
buildings, each representing a certain percentage of the total office building stock of the United
States. These 25 building models are now included in the TESS Loads and Structures Component Library
add-on to TRNSYS. Further work improved on the initial method by using airflows from multi-zone airflow
simulations combined with a simple load calculation. This approach included the coupling of a detailed
multi-zone airflow model based on the CONTAMW model and the detailed multi-zone building energy modeling
program TRNSYS. This project demonstrated the ability of the coupled programs to study the annual
heating and cooling energy use in the US office building stock as a function of infiltration and
ventilation rates. |
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