Free Software to Improve Building Retrofits, Energy Modeling
Oct. 22, 2015
Tool makes efficiency adjustments automatically.
A new open-source software tool that uses automated calibration techniques to tweak commercial and residential building energy efficiency software models to match measured data is now available.
The Autotune code, named after the audio software known for adjusting pitch in music recordings, can perform no-touch audits, provide guidance for the most efficient retrofit procedures, and allow other data-driven decisions to be made for buildings under 50,000 square feet, which are too small to be served by traditional building modeling systems.
The code was developed by researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Building Technologies Research and Integration Center, who used DOE supercomputing resources to perform millions of energy modeling simulations for a variety of building types. This allowed the team to find techniques and computations that help a building’s performance match measured data. Rather than requiring a large number of adjustments and modifications to be made manually, the software is designed to automatically optimize building parameters to save money and energy.
