ASHRAE's Energy Modeling Conference - Tools for Designing High Performance Buildings is designed to guide building design professionals on what does and doesn't work when using currently available modeling tools.

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ASHRAE's Energy Modeling Conference – Tools for Designing High Performance Buildings is slated for Oct. 1-3, 2012 in Atlanta. The conference will guide building design professionals about what does and does not work when using currently available modeling tools to design and analyze buildings and their energy using systems.

“The conference will provide the design professional with ‘workarounds’ that may be applied to improve the results of their modeling results when their modeling tool of choice may not be capable of modeling some of the more unique or hybrid buildings or energy using systems being used in high performance buildings today,” Dennis Knight, conference chair, said.

With a focus on case studies and real world examples, the conference will allow an exchange of ideas among design professionals and software developers to facilitate understanding of current modeling tools and their capabilities and limitations and identify the need for new tools and improvements to existing modeling and simulation tools. The conference will guide design professionals toward developing in-house modeling checklists and quality control procedures to improve their competence and confidence in making decisions and recommendations based on modeling in their day-to-day practices.

Building on the Energy Modeling Conference format in April 2011, this conference will begin with an interactive session with modeling software developers presenting common modeling scenarios on how their specific software can model a scenario, whether there are any limitations and what might be the best work around and exceptional modeling practices to obtain acceptable results when the tool cannot model the scenario out-of-the-box.

ASHRAE is looking for case studies and actual projects and how they were analyzed and designed using modeling tools as well as integrated and interoperable modeling tools to best optimize buildings and energy-using systems.  Presentation abstracts are requested on the following topics: 

• HVAC load analysis
• Energy modeling
• Side-by-side software provider presentations on their ability to address specific modeling system types and applications and energy simulation programs
• Code and standards compliance issues
• ENERGY STAR, LEED and other high performance building guidelines’ impacts on models
• Innovative system modeling: chilled beams, water source heat pumps, renewables, variable refrigerant flow, cogeneration, labyrinths, electronically commutated motors
• Integration of analytic modeling tools with building information modeling Exceptional modeling techniques for when tools just do not work
• Simplified and rapid modeling techniques that may be applied for early analysis
• Integration of daylighting, computational fluid dynamics and other exceptional modeling techniques and results into HVAC simulations
• Lifecycle cost analysis.

 Details on the conference for potential presenters can be found here.

- Edited by Chris Vavra, Consulting-Specifying Engineer, www.csemag.com