ENERGYPLUS: A NEW-GENERATION BUILDING ENERGY SIMULATION PROGRAM

摘要

Many of the popular building energy simulation programs around the world are reaching maturity-some use simulation methods (and even code) that originated in the 1960s. For more than two decades, the U.S. government supported separate development of two hourly building energy simulation programs, BLAST and DOE-2. Designed in the days of mainframe computers, expanding their capabilities further became difficult, time-consuming, and prohibitively expensive. At the same time, significant advances in analysis and computational methods and power occurred―providing an opportunity for significant improvement in these tools. In 1996, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) began developing a new building energy simulation tool called EnergyPlus. This work built on development experience with two existing programs: DOE-2 and BLAST. EnergyPlus includes a number of innovative simulation features―such as variable time steps, user-configurable modular systems that are integrated with a heat and mass balance-based zone simulation―and input and output data structures tailored to facilitate third party module and interface development. Other planned simulation capabilities include multizone airflow, and electric power and solar thermal and photovoltaic simulation. Beginning in late 1999, a series of five beta test versions were released. Version 1.0 of EnergyPlus was released in April 2001.