A process to divide curved walls in IFC-BIM into segmented straight walls for building energy analysis

Abstract

The amount of energy that buildings consume is currently attracting significant interest throughout the world, and considerable attention is being devoted to the development of green buildings to reduce energy consumption; how­ever, the current process being used to conduct building energy analysis has a significant shortcoming in that it cannot directly use building information modelling (BIM)-based representational data that includes a curved wall. Currently, the curved wall must be converted into segmented straight walls (SSWs) in the building model in order for the building energy analysis (BEA) program to be able to recognize and use the data. In this paper, we have proposed a segmentation process for curved walls in industry foundation classes (IFC)-based BIM for BEA. The proposed process consists of three sub-processes: 1) extracting data from the IFC model; 2) dividing the curved wall into several segmented straight walls; and 3) generating an INP file as a building description for DOE-2.2-based BEA. The proposed process will enable the engineers who are responsible for BEA to use a BIM-based model directly in the BEA program without having to do additional work. The proposed process can help ensure that the BEA results are accurate and reliable.

First published online: 24 Aug 2015