www.buildingsandcities.org/journal-content/special-issues/trusting-building-performance-simulation2.html
Trusting Building Performance Simulation
As codes and regulations become stricter, is simulation the right tool for compliance as well as sketching performance to assist design?
This special issue examines whether building performance simulations can be trusted for their accuracy and reliability. An increasing urgency exists to provide a prediction of performance over the next 50-100 years. As carbon limits become more fixed on absolute performance, a consensus is needed on how to examine performance reliably and accurately – both for new buildings as well as interventions in existing buildings. Several different concerns are addressed pertaining to the building performance gap - particularly practices and expectations.
This special issue reports on quality assurance measures, case studies, user studies that address the development of trust in the performance calculations of designers. The performance gap is not only a problem of inaccurate models, but is partly a result of misguided expectations of what building performance simulation (BPS) tools can predict. As BPS outputs are the result of models that are approximations of reality, building codes need more appropriate performance metrics that test the robustness or reliability of performance, not compliance with some mythical ‘typical’ performance number.
The value of models is to ensure that time and money are not being invested on issues with little benefit to building occupants or investors. BPS has the potential to provide very detailed information that could allow code officials to quantity the risk that buildings might perform in a different manner than has been modelled. In order to achieve this goal, simulation experts need to be far more engaged with definition of and compliance with building energy performance. In addition, experts need to articulate these issues more clearly in order to manage expectations.
Guest editor: Michael Donn
Table of contents
Simulation and the building performance gap [editorial]
M. Donn
Building performance simulation for sense-making in architectural pedagogy
M. Bohm
Metrics for building component disassembly potential: a practical framework
H. Järvelä, A. Lehto, T. Pirilä & M. Kuittinen
Quantifying inter-dwelling air exchanges during fan pressurisation tests
D. Glew, F. Thomas, D. Miles-Shenton & J. Parker
Understanding shading through home-use experience, measurement and modelling
M. Baborska-Narożny, K. Bandurski & M. Grudzińska
Modelling site-specific outdoor temperature for buildings in urban environments
K. Cebrat, J. Narożny, M.
Baborska-Narożny & M. Smektała
Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Content
Moving homes and energy poverty: residents’ concerns, capabilities and responses
M Jalas, J Rinkinen, S Numminen & E Valkealahti
Reference study for biogenic carbon storage in the residential building stock
O Iliescu, I Talvitie, A Amiri & S Junnila
Building space heating and cooling in NDCs 4.0
T P Lützkendorf
Building component reuse as sociomaterial interaction: lessons from precast concrete
J Uusikartano, L Alkki & V Capitani
Validating national reuse indicators from regional demolition data: a Swedish example
F Ericsson, K Mjörnell & U Janson
Climate change risk and decision-making [editorial]
S Foxell & I Cooper
Technologies of reconstruction [editorial]
P Tombesi
Urban form metrics for building occupancy modelling: applications and impacts
D Reiter, M Jehling & R Hecht
Retrofit realism: affordable low-carbon policies for existing homes
N Eyre & R Khosla
Join Our Community
The most important part of any journal is our people – readers, authors, reviewers, editorial board members and editors. You are cordially invited to join our community by joining our mailing list. We send out occasional emails about the journal – calls for papers, special issues, events and more.
We will not share your email with third parties. Read more
Latest Commentaries
Who is Responsible for Climate Change?
Ian Cooper (Eclipse Research) explores the questions of responsibility raised in the recent Buildings & Cities special issue ‘Climate Change Risk and Decision-Making’. Focusing here on carbon emissions and mitigation, global responses will require grounding in what can work locally. New responsibilities arise for the wide range of built environment decision-makers: clients, professionals and their institutions, central and local governments, product suppliers, financiers, insurers, etc. A framework is needed to manage the complexity of responsibilities especially for variety of actors, the time frames and spatial scales.
Professional Ethics in a Climate Crisis
The climate crisis has progressed into a dangerous phase with tragic consequences often counted in numbers of excess deaths, but also by powerful economic impacts of rising food prices, the increased costs of insurance and lending, costly damage to the built environment. Celia Davies, Director of Impact at the UK’s Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and Hugh Ellis, Director of Policy at TCPA, consider the responsibilities of professionals in shaping a built environment which is fit not just for today's climate risks but for the dramatic increase in severe and unpredictable weather which is now locked into our climate systems.