Advancement of DOE's EnergyPlus Building Energy Simulation Payment
- Florida Solar Energy Center, Cocoa, FL (United States)
- DHL Consulting, Bonn (Germany)
- Univ. of Illinois, Champaign, IL (United States)
- COPA, Panama City (Panama)
- Oklahoma State Univ., Stillwater, OK (United States)
- GARD Analytics, Arlington Heights, IL (United States)
- Wrightsoft, Lexington, MA (United States)
EnergyPlus{sup TM} is a new generation computer software analysis tool that has been developed, tested, and commercialized to support DOE's Building Technologies (BT) Program in terms of whole-building, component, and systems R&D (http://www.energyplus.gov). It is also being used to support evaluation and decision making of zero energy building (ZEB) energy efficiency and supply technologies during new building design and existing building retrofits. The 5-year project was managed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory and was divided into 5 budget period between 2006 and 2011. During the project period, 11 versions of EnergyPlus were released. This report summarizes work performed by an EnergyPlus development team led by the University of Central Florida's Florida Solar Energy Center (UCF/FSEC). The team members consist of DHL Consulting, C. O. Pedersen Associates, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oklahoma State University, GARD Analytics, Inc., and WrightSoft Corporation. The project tasks involved new feature development, testing and validation, user support and training, and general EnergyPlus support. The team developed 146 new features during the 5-year period to advance the EnergyPlus capabilities. Annual contributions of new features are 7 in budget period 1, 19 in period 2, 36 in period 3, 41 in period 4, and 43 in period 5, respectively. The testing and validation task focused on running test suite and publishing report, developing new IEA test suite cases, testing and validating new source code, addressing change requests, and creating and testing installation package. The user support and training task provided support for users and interface developers, and organized and taught workshops. The general support task involved upgrading StarTeam (team sharing) software and updating existing utility software. The project met the DOE objectives and completed all tasks successfully. Although the EnergyPlus software was enhanced significantly under this project, more enhancements are needed for further improvement to ensure that EnergyPlus is able to simulate the latest technologies and perform desired HAVC system operations for the development of next generation HVAC systems. Additional development will be performed under a new 5-year project managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
- Research Organization:
- Florida Solar Energy Center, Cocoa, FL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC26-06NT42768
- OSTI ID:
- 1043689
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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