Executive Director, Trevor Lee, addressed the joint conference on building simulation convened by the Australian Institute of Refrigeration, Airconditioning and Heating (AIRAH) and the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) Australasia last week.
The hybrid event (in-person and virtual attendance) enabled addresses from learned keynote speakers from around the world. The first was Victor Olgyay from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Colorado USA who spoke on “Designing for the climate we want”. His Carbon Free Building Practice division of RMI is actively engaged globally, consulting on how best to achieve this in the full range of climates. His address led into the three Exemplary presentations:
- Improved real-time year weather data services with Bureau of Meteorology data;
- Extreme climate data files for design resilience; and
- Disaggregation of precipitation data applicable for climate-aware planning in built environments.
That last presentation flowed into a brief discussion on the foibles present in the latest data sets offered by the CSIRO (out of date, without precipitation data and with a mistiming of solar data by 30 minutes and of the other data by 60 minutes. See the graphs below for a summary of key details.
That diversion to data quality did not detract from the consideration of rain and water penetration for the conference as a whole: Later that morning, Freya Su, University of Tasmania, presented on “The incorporation of precipitation into climate data and its impacts on hygrothermal simulations”.
Day two began with Professor Susan Ubbelohde (Loisos + Ubbelohde, USA) giving a visually exciting presentation on “Simulation in practice: Collaboration, iteration, visualisation and validation” replete with simulated images and movies of grand buildings proposed for the United Arab Emirates in particular and then went to the small end of the field describing the use of two-year-old weather data with EnergyPlus to thermally model the inside of a house at the time of a death which occurred within it. That information, in combination with the condition of the body when found, allowed a precise estimation of the date and time of death which informed the resulting murder trial.
Associate Professor Jen Martin, School of Biosciences, University of Melbourne, changed the pace and direction with her inspired teaching of “How to be a more effective communicator – and why it matters” and PC Thomas, Team Catalyst, closed the conference as the DesignBuilder sponsor with a convenient encapsulation of “Insights from changes to stringency in the National Construction Code” discussing the energy efficiency minima set out in the NCC’s Section J.
Readers wanting more detail on any of this can visit the full program at https://www.airah.org.au/BuildingSimulation/Program/BuildingSimulation/Program.aspx?hkey=6e66c2c9-4a25-4218-8cd7-e40365cfc1bc