BauSIM 2020 Roundtable Discussion — part 3
BauSIM 2020 Roundtable Discussion BauSIM 2020 included a roundtable discussion with leading experts in the field of building performance simulation on the topic of “challenges and future endeavors”. Participants for this discussion were Professor Joe Clarke (Professor Emeritus, University of Strathclyde, FIBPSA), Professor John Grunewald (Professor and Chair of Building Physics, TU Dresden), Dr Per Sahlin (CEO EQUA Simulation AB, FIBPSA), Dr Michael Wetter (Deputy Leader Simulation Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), FIBPSA), Andrew Corney (Product Manager at Trimble - SketchUp and Sefaira, UK; FIBPSA), and Professor Lori McElroy (University of Strathclyde). The discussion was chaired by Christina Hopfe. This is the third and final extract from the discussion, which took place at the University of Technology (TU) Graz. The first and second extracts were published in the previous two newsletters, April and October 2021. This part of the discussion started by considering a question submitted beforehand by Andrew Corney: “Has simulation during COVID-19 really enabled practitioners to provide the guidance people need to safely return to buildings?” Christina: Andrew, you have asked a very timely question. Should IBPSA really play a role in this? Andrew Corney (Andrew): Well, I guess that’s a really good question. In the UK, where I live,
the government’s had its foot on the accelerator and the brake about getting people to go back to work in an office. And although I haven’t had time to comment on all of the documentation that CIBSE has written, I don’t think our industry gave very clear guidance to people who own office buildings, or who rent office buildings, on how to determine whether or not that office building is really a good place to go back to. And there are many levels on which we don’t provide that guidance particularly well. One might be in terms of helping people identify what characteristics a building actually has or what a tenancy actually has, which could potentially be solved by digital twins. But another level is how well are pollutants removed from the space, or how well is the space actually ventilated in real life and what would be the risks associated with certain densities of people being inside that office space? And I don’t think I’ve seen any really compelling things come out of our industry relating to this to help people answer or solve those questions. And I certainly don’t think that we have software solutions or practitioners equipped to answer these questions at the scale that would be required for us to be able to be effective in society at answering these questions. It’s not that we can’t do it. It’s not that we don’t have software tools that can do that. But when you look at the capabilities of the practitioners and what we’ve trained them to do, which is essentially energy code modelling, and then you look at the time it takes to build simulation models that investigate dispersal of pollutants inside buildings, we are not equipping society to understand the risks of each and every office building as an office manager or as a tenant manager tries to work out whether or not that place is safe to go back to work - or how many people could be in that building, or how the building could be changed to make that place safer. And so I think that it’s a real shame that we find ourselves in this situation where we have somehow let society down a little bit in the way we could have contributed to this problem and then how we have actually done that. Christina: What do the others think about this? Should we actually be seeking to expand IBPSA’s remit to the
application of building simulation in buildings, or is that actually the role of other organizations? Per Sahlin (Per): Maybe I can respond to some extent to that.The name of the association is Building
Performance Simulation Association and that should, in my opinion, include everything in the building that is modellable, so to speak, in a meaningful way. So, I wouldn’t put any formal limits on ventilation efficiency. But I do see some very concrete problems with providing useful help to say something about the COVID-19 safeness
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volume 32 number 1
