PluginTEASER

The TEASER Plugin is one the two currently implemented Plugins for building performance simulation (BPS). It uses the open source tool TEASER as backend to export Modelica simulation models based on the input IFC data. For a detailed insight how TEASER works please have a look at the documentation of TEASER. The exported simulation models can be simulated using the open source library AixLib. Following you will find some information how TEASER addresses the challenges of automated building simulation.

How to install?

Step by step

To install PluginTEASER: you need to do the following (in the root directory of the repo, here is the pyproject.toml file)

pip install -e '.[PluginTEASER]'

The bim2sim core installation needs to be done before.

Test install

Examples

Please also take a look at bim2sim/plugins/PluginTEASER/bim2sim_teaser/examples, which provides some runnable examples for the TEASER plugin. You can use these examples to test your installation and learn from them. Additionally, they serve as good starting points for your own projects.”

Structure of the plugin

The following figure shows the structure of the TEASER plugin. Here you see which tasks are used and how they are combined.

(Hint: firefox has issue display mermaid figures completely, for more infos see issue #766)

This figure is generated by the script template_mermaid.py (see Visualization of bim2sim plugin structure).

How to create a project?

How to load an IFC file?

How to configure my project?

Simulation settings

Configuration file

Default tasks

Additional templates

How to run the project?

How to run the simulation?

How to analyze the project?

What kind of results exist?

What programs/tools to use for further analysis?

Enrichment

See Enrichment.

Space Boundary Usage

Currently, TEASER prefers the semantic input from IFC data to get important data like the area of walls. But as these information often are not correct or not existing TEASER uses also the information provided by space boundaries. The space boundaries are also mandatory for Zoning, see below. With growing quality of IFC exports in authoring tools we might see complete IFCs with all semantic information needed to parametrize a BPS. At this point TEASEr will allow the creation of a single zone simulation model without the need of Space Boundaries, as the space boundaries are only needed for zoning in this case.

Zoning

As TEASERs simulation core offers multizone simulation models, but each zone is adiabatic and interacts only with the environment but the zones don’t interact with each other. Even if just putting every room into one thermalzone might be easy but not sensible as shown in this paper.

As the zoning of simulation models is a time-consuming task we decided to automate it with the task (BindThermalZones)[BindThermalZones]. We do this by giving the user multiple criteria to select from:

  • External/Internal

  • Orientation

  • Usage

  • Window to wall ratio

To create those zones we first need to disaggregate the elements of each room based on 2nd level space boundaries and put them together again afterwards.

External/Internal

By selecting this criteria all zones with contact to the environment will be in one group and all rooms without contact in the other.

Orientation

This groups the zones into two groups, south-west orientated and north-east orientated zones. This is useful as the south-west group is exposed to solar radiation at a high level, while the north-east group will have only negligible solar radiation input. Mixing both groups together can lead to misleading results regarding peak loads as loads are smoothed out.

Usage

This groups the zones based on the usage type of each room. bim2sim tries to estimate the usage of each room based on the name of the room and multiple IFC properties which might be set by the authoring tool. If the usage can’t be found a Decision will be triggered to get the correct usage.

Window to wall ratio

With this criteria the zones are grouped into 4 groups based on their window to wall ratio or glass percentage:

  • 0 - 30 %

  • 30 - 50 %

  • 50 - 70 %

  • 70 - 100 % This is useful as rooms with high glass percentage will have less thermal mass and inertia and higher solar radiation input which makes their dynamic different from the ones with low glass percentage.