BUILDING MODELS DESIGN AND ENERGY SIMULATION WITH GOOGLE SKETCHUP AND OPENSTUDIO

Abstract

The necessity to approach the zero net building design and the improving of building thermal performance augmented the need to use the energy simulation programmes in order to estimate the building energy consumption and virtually modify the structure and the construction material. Energy Plus software from the US Department of Energy introduced a plug-in for Google SketchUp drawing software known as Open Studio, this tool can be considered as a free licences powerful simulation tool available for all engineers to estimate and modify the buildings energy consumption. In this paper we presented a step by step simulation procedure to explain the software capability and encourage the use of the tool by engineers interested in energy efficiency calculations