The ECOnirman Whole Building Performance is a “high-fidelity” virtual building analysis service. Created for the country of India through funding from the USAID (United States Agency for International Development), ECOnirman allows architects and designers in India to create, model, and predict their future building’s energy performance.
The India Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) requires all new buildings to conform to national energy efficiency guidelines. The tool creates a high-fidelity, accurate virtual building during the design phase. In addition to entering detailed space usage, detailed HVAC specifications, and hourly building activity schedules, the ECOnirman tool allows the architect to specify the shape, structure, orientation, zone affiliation, and building materials.
The user can also create more than one HVAC system and assign each space type to one of the HVAC systems. This allows a high-demand area of a building (like a data center) to be provisioned as it would be in a real building. In another example of creating a “high-fidelity” virtual building, passive building artifacts such as shading overhangs or vertical extensions can be specified.
In “low-fidelity” building simulations, default settings derived from existing buildings are used to produce a relatively close estimation of energy use. In the past “high-fidelity”, modeling would take hours to complete a single simulation. With ECOnirman, we can run a high-fidelity simulation in under one minute. In many ways, ECOnirman exemplifies the state-of-the-art in virtual building modeling.